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THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD 



THE CHILDREN 
OF THE COLD 



BY 

FREDERICK SCHWATKA, 

Author of " Along Alaska's Great River," " Nimrod in the 

North, or Hunting and Fishing Adventures in 

the Arctic Regions," etc., etc. 



NEW EDITION 



EDUCATIONAL PUBLISHING COMPANY 

BOSTON 

New York Chicago San Francisco 



Copyrighted, 1895, by 
THE CASSELL PUBLISHING CO. 



Copyrighted, 1899, ^^ 
THE EDUCATIONAL PUBLISHING CO. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

WHERE AND HOW THEY T-TVi? . . . g 

CHAPTER II. 

HOW THEIR HOUSES ARE BUILT, ■■ ■ • ?» 

CHAPTER III. 

LITTLE BOREAS'S PLAYTHINGS, ' ■ * 44 

CHAPTER IV. 

ESKIMO SLEDS — COASTING, - - - . 6o 

CHAPTER V. 

FEEDING THE DOGS, 8o 

CHAPTER VI. 

SOME OUTDOOR SPORTS, " * " " 93 

CHAPTER VII. 

ESKIMO CANDY, --.... m 



VI CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER VIII. 

ATHLETIC AMUSEMENTS, - - - - Il6 

CHAPTER IX. 

ESKIMO PATIENCE, ..... 132 

CHAPTER X. 

LITTLE BOREAS'S WORK, .... 142 

CHAPTER XI. 

SEAL HUNTING, 154 



CHAPTER XII. 

FISHING, 



160 



CHAPTER XIII. 

HOW THEIR CLOTHES ARE MADE, - - - I?! 

CHAPTER XIV. 

FOUR ESKIMO CHILDREN, - - - "175 

CHAPTER XV. 

HOW WE PASSED THE WINTER, ... 202 




CHAPTER I. 



WHERE AND HOW THEY LIVE. 

\ WAY up near the North Pole, in that 
-'- ^ very coldest portion of the earth's 
surface known as the Arctic Regions ; 
where the sun can never get very high 
above the horizon, although for a part of 
the year it does shine all day and nearly 
all night ; where for the rest of the year 
it scarcely shines at all, and where, there- 
fore, the climate is dreary, cold, and 
cheerless the whole year round, there live 
a great many people- — men and women, 



lO THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

boys and girls, and little bits of babies. 
And, though to us their country seems 
about the most dismal part of the world 
it is possible to find, yet they really are 
the most happy, cheerful, and merry 
people on the globe, hardly thinking of 
the morrow, and spending the present as 
pleasantly as possible. 

These cheerful people, in their cheer- 
less country of ice and snow, must, like 
all of us, at an early time of their life have 
been babies, and to describe these Arctic 
babies is the main object of this book — to 
tell the boys and girls what kind of toys 
and pleasures and picnics and all sorts of 
fun may be had where you would hardly 
think any could be had at all ; also, 
some of the discomforts of living in 
this most uncomfortable country. 

Right near the pole, where day and 



WHERE AND HOW THEY LIVE. n 

night ar. five or six months long-, and 
where it is so very, very cold, none of 
these people live, as there are no animals 
for them to kill and live upon ; but 
around about the outer edge of this re- 
gion — that is, in the Arctic circle, and 
sometimes far back along the sea-coast — 
the greater part of them are to be found. 

All over Arctic America, as you will 
see it in your geography, these people 
are of one kind, speaking nearly the same 
language, and very much alike in other 
respects. They are called the Eskimo ; 
or, as the name is sometimes spelled, 
Esquimaux. All over Arctic Europe and 
Asia (looking again at your geography), 
there are scattered many tribes of these 
people, speaking different languages, and 
differing in many other respects. 

As I lived for a time among the former, 



12 ThE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

» the Eskimo, my descriptions will apply 
only to that nation, and only to those 
parts which I visited ; for when you 
looked at your geography, if you did 
so carefully, you must have seen that 
the Arctic part of North America was 
an immense tract of land reaching from 
the Atlantic to the Pacific, across the 
widest part of America, and that it 
would take a single traveler almost a 
long life-time to see al-1 the Eskimo and 
study carefully their homes, habits, and 
customs. I did not merely live in a ship 
or a tent or house of my own alongside 
the tents and huts of the natives, and 
from there occasionally visit them ; but 
I, with my little party of three other 
white men, lived for two years in Eskimo 
tents and huts, so that we made these 
savages' homes our own. 



WHERE AND HOW THEY LIVE. 13 

After a while, these Eskimo began to 
consider us a part of their own tribe, 
gave us Eskimo names, by which we were 
known among the tribe, invited us to 
participate in their games and amuse- 
ments, and in cases of direst want, when 
their superstitions drove them to their 
singular rites and ceremonies to avert the 
threatened dangers, they even asked us 
to join in using our mysterious influence. 
We four white men did not live in the 
same snow-hut all the time, but for many 
months were living apart from each other 
in the different snow houses of the natives 
themselves, and this did much to make 
the natives feel kindly toward us. We 
made sledge journeys among them away 
from our home for many months, taking 
their best hunters with us, and found 
many other natives who had never before 



14 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

seen any white men ; and when there 
seemed to be any danger from the wily 
tricks and stratagems of these wilder 
savages, the members of the tribe with 
which we lived would, as far as they 
could, tell us all about it and consult with 
us as to defense, just as if we were their 
brothers, and not white men, wholly dif- 
ferent from them, while the ones they 
were thus plotting against were Eskimo, 
like themselves. 

Their little children, too, played with 
us and around us, just as if our faces 
were a few shades darker and we were 
truly their own kind ; and as it is of them 
you naturally desire to hear, you can see 
that we were in a position to find out by 
long experience what can be told you 
about them. 

As soon as little Boreas (as we shall 



WHERE AND HOW THEY LIVE. 



15 



call the Eskimo baby) is born, and indeed 
until he is able to walk, he is always to 
be found on his mother's back when she 
is out of doors or making visits to other 
houses. All of the Eskimo's clothes are 
made of reindeer skins, so nicely dressed 
that they are as soft and limber as velvet, 
and warmer than any clothes you have 
ever seen anywhere, even than the nice, 
warm sealskin sacks and muffs that 
American ladies wear in winter. They 
have two suits of this reindeer clothing, 
completely covering them : the inner suit 
with the reindeer's fur turned toward the 
body, and the outer one with the hair 
outside like a sealskin sack. The 
coats have hoods sewed tightly on their 
collars, so that when they are put on, 
only the eyes, nose and mouth are 
exposed to the cold. 



l6 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

When Boreas's mother makes the hood 
for her reindeer suit, she stretches it into 
a long sack or bag, that hangs down 
and is supported by her shoulders, and 
this bag of reindeer's skin is little 
Boreas's cradle and home, where he lives 
until he knows how to walk, when he gets 
his own first suit of clothing. When 
Boreas gets very cold, as when he is out 
of doors in an Arctic winter's day with 
the bitter, cold wind blowing — when he 
gets so very cold that he commences cry- 
ing about it — his mother will take him 
out of the bag and put him on her back 
under both her coats, where he will be 
held by a lot of sealskin strings passing 
back and forth under him and around his 
mother's shoulders over her dress ; and 
there he will be very warm, directly 
against her body and under her two fur 



WHERE AND HOW THEY LIVE. 



17 



coats, besides the four thicknesses of the 
hood wherein he was riding before. 

This, as I have already said, is while 
little Boreas is out-of-doors or his mother 




LITTLE BOREAS AND HIS MOTHER. 

is making a social visit. When at his 
own home, in order not to trouble his 
mother while she is sewing or cooking or 
doing such other work, the little baby is 
allowed to roll around almost without 



1 8 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

clothing, among the reindeer skins that 
make the bed, where it amuses itself with 
any thing it can lay its hands on, from a 
hatchet to a snow-stick. This stick is 
much like a policeman's club, and is used 
for knocking snow off of the reindeer 
clothes ; for when the Eskimo come in- 




AN ESKIMO LAMP. 



doors, they all take off their outside suit 
and beat it with this stick, to rid it of the 
snow that covers them. 

You doubtless think little Boreas 
should have a nice time rolling around to 
his heart's content on the soft, warm rein- 
deer skins ; but when I tell you more 



WHERE AND HOW THEY LIVE. 



19 



about his little home, you may not then 
think so. It is so cold in the Arctic 
country in the winter that no timber can 
grow at all, just as it never grows on the 
cold summits of the very high snow-cov- 
ered mountains. Sometimes the Eskimo, 
by trading with the whale-ships, get wood 
enough to make the sledges or the spear- 
handles with which they kill seal and 
walrus, but not enough to build houses. 
Sometimes they pick up a little on the 
bleak sea-beach, where the ocean currents 
have brought it for many hundreds of 
miles from warmer climates ; but they 
have no tools, and they do not know how 
to cut the wood into boards if they had 
the tools. Never having seen any timber 
growing as in our woods and forests, they 
have to make guesses where it comes 
from. One tribe I met thought the logs 



20 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

they occasionally found, grew at the bot- 
tom of the sea, and when the tree reached 
nearly to the surface of the water, its top 
became cauQ^ht and frozen in the thick 
ice, and in the summer, when the ice 
broke up, the tree was pulled up by the 
roots and floated to the nearest shore. 

Now, as little Boreas's father has 
neither wood nor mortar to use on the 
stones, he is rather at a loss, you think, 
for building material. But, no. He 
takes the very last thing you would think 
of choosing to make a house from in a 
cold winter. That is, he builds his win- 
ter home of snow. 

" But won't the snow melt and the 
house tumble in?" you will ask. Of 
course it will, if you get it warmer than 
just the coldness at which water freezes ; 
but during the greater part of the year it 



WHERE AMD HOW THEY LIVE. 21 

is so cold that the snow will not melt, 
even when the Eskimo burn fire in their 
stone lamps inside these snow houses ; 
so, by closely regulating the amount of 
the fire, they can just keep the snow from 
melting. Their stone lamps look like 
large clam-shells, the shell holding the 
oil, and the flame being built along 
the straight, shallow edge, while the 
wicking is the moss they gather from 
the rocks. In short, it must always be 
cold enough in their home to freeze. 

So you can see that little Boreas can 
not have such a very nice time, and you 
can't see how in the world he can be al- 
most naked nearly all day long when it is 
so cold. But such is the fact. Think of 
taking the baby of your house out for a 
walk or a ride in the park when the leaves 
have all fallen, the ground covered with 



22 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

snow, and the ice forming on the lake, 
and the Httle baby almost unclothed at 
that, and then you can imagine what the 
Eskimo baby has to go through. 

Yet, in spite of all this, little Boreas 
really enjoys himself. He gets used to 
the cold, and has great fun frolicking 
around on the reindeer skins and playing 
with his toys ; and when I have told you 
some other stories about the cold these 
little folks can endure, you can understand 
how they can enjoy themselves in the 
snow huts, or igloos, as they call them, 
when it is only a little colder than freez- 
ing. 

At times, the fire will get too warm in 
the snow house, and then the ceiling will 
commence melting — for you all perhaps 
have learned at school that when a room 
becomes warmed it is warmer at the ceil- 



WHERE AND HOW THEY LIVE. 



25 



ing and cooler near the floor. So with 
the hut of snow ; it commences melting 
at the top because it is warmer there — 
and when two or three drops of cold 
water have fallen on little Boreas's bare 
shoulders, his father or mother finds that 
it is getting too warm, and cuts down the 
fire. 

When the water commences dropping, 
the mother will often take a snow-ball 
from the floor, where it is colder than 
freezing, and stick it against the point 
where the water is dripping. There it 
freezes fast and soaks up the water just 
like a sponge until it becomes full ; and 
then she removes it and puts on another, 
as soon as it commences to drip again. 
Sometimes she will forget to remove it, 
and when it gets soaked and heavy with 
water and warm enoug^h to lose its freez- 



26 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

ing hold, down it comes ! perhaps right 
on Boreas's bare back, where it flattens 
out like a slushy pancake — or into his 
face, as it once served me. For one of 
these snow-balls about the size of my fist 
fell plumb into a tin-cup full of soup just 
as I was about drinking from it, and 
splashed half of the soup in my face. 
Once or twice I have seen these slushy 
snow-balls fall down the back of a person 
sitting upon the bed ; and when the cold 
slush gets in between the skin and the 
reindeer coat— well, you can easily be= 
lieve that it does not feel agreeable. 



CHAPTER II. 

HOW THEIR HOUSES ARE BUILT. 

TF, when you cut your boiled egg in 
-'- two at breakfast (if you are not break- 
fasting with a French aristocrat, who 
never cuts, but only chips, his egg), and 
have taken out the meat, you will put 
the two shells, rims down, on the table, 
you will have a miniature representa- 
tion of a couple of Eskimo snow huts 
or winter homes. The fuller shell, or 
big end of the Qgg, will represent 
an i£'loo during the coldest weather, 



28 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

when the snow is frozen hard and 
firm, and it can be built flat without 
danger of falling in, and can thus be 
made much more comfortable. The 
pointed shell, or little end of the ^gg, 
will represent an igloo, as it must be built 
in the early fall or late in the spring, 




DIAGRAM OF THE PLAN OF THE ESKIMO SNOW-HUT, 
OR IGLOO. 

when it is getting warm and the igloo is 
liable to melt and tumble in. 

If through a hole in the top you pour 
your model about one-third full of water 
and plaster of Paris, mixed, or melted 
wax, or something that will harden, and 
when it has hardened, if you take a knife 



HOW THEIR HOUSES ARE BUILT. 31 

and cut down through it so as to take off 
about a third, what is left will represent 
the bed, as in illustration which, you see, 
occupies nearly the whole of the room. 
Curious as it may seem, this bed is also 
built of snow, but enough reindeer robes, 
bear and musk-ox skins are placed over 
it to keep the warmth of the body from 
melting the bed. 

If with a lead-pencil you draw a con- 
tinuous spiral line on the egg-shell, far 
enough apart so that there will be four 
or five lines from bottom to top directly 
above each other, and then if you draw 
lines about twice as far apart as these 
almost horizontal ones, but broken so as 
to represent brick-work, each little block 
that you thus represent is a snow-block 
of which the igloo is built. The real 
snow-blocks are about three feet long. 



32 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

about a foot and a-half wide, and six 
inches to a foot thick, which would, of 
course, make the thickness of the igloo 
itself. A row of these is laid on the 
ground, the long edge down, in the shape 
of a circle, and this is continued around, 
just as on your egg-shell, until the snow 
house is built, the last snow-block, of 
course, being then perfectly horizontal. 
They make most of the igloos just so high 
that, when standing on the floor in front 
of the bed, their heads will not be bump- 
ing against the roof, although it is hard 
to tell just where the house-walls stop 
and the roof commences. When they 
build their snow houses to live in a long 
time, however, they make them higher 
and flatter in the roof than when they are 
to be used for one or two nights only; 
for it must be remembered that their 



I/O IV THEIR HOUSES ARE BUILT. 33 

igloos in the winter time serve them the 
same use as tents wherever they travel* 
the smaller kind' taking them, if they are 
industrious, but about an hour to build — 
no one, not even an Eskimo, being able 
to live in a tent in the coldest weather of 
these polar regions. 

Just in front of the bed, and not much 
higher, is the little door-way, where the 
occupants enter the house. In order to 
do so they must get down fiat on their 
hands and knees and crawl in. To 
prevent the snow from the top of the 
door-way brushing off and falling down 
the neck and back, each Eskimo puts his 
skin hood over his head before entering, 
and just as soon as his shoulders are well 
in the house he shoves the legs back and 
begins to straighten up so as to prevent 
running his nose square into the snow of 



34 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

which the bed is made. So you will see 
that the igloo is lacking very much in the 
"elbow room" which the homes in 
warmer climates have ; but, nevertheless, 
the lonely Eskimo and his little boy 
Boreas seem perfectly happy with the 
home they have, and wonder how in the 
world any person could wish for any 
more. The door for this entrance-way 
is nothing but a big block of snow stuck 
in the little hole which may be called the 
door-way, and is used as much to keep 
out the dogs as it is to keep out the cold. 
A small igloo of snow is often built in 
front of the door (as shown in the picture 
on page 'i^'f), to prevent the wind fromi 
getting in easily, and this little storm 
igloo is always full of dogs, who crowd in 
hereto keep away from the sharp, biting 
wind. The Eskimo dogs, however, will 



BOJV THEIR HOUSES ARE BUILT. 35 

sleep right out on the hard-frozen snow 
banks, If they have plenty to eat, and 
never seem to mind it, even though the 
ice on the lakes and rivers may have 
frozen to a thickness of six or eight feet. 
And now, as the Eskimo dogs have 
been mentioned, you boys who have a 
favorite Carlo or Nero at home will wish 
to know about those Arctic dogs ; ask 
ing what I mean by plenty to eat, and 
whether, like your own favorites, they 
get three meals a day and any number 
of intermediate lunches. No doubt you 
will think that they really should get 
ever so much more on account of their 
hard work in pulling the sledges, and in 
such a cold country. Yet, hard as it 
may seem, the Eskimo dog never gets 
fed oftener than every other day, and 
generally about every third day ; while- 



36 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

in times of want and starvation in that 
terrible country of cold, the length of 
time these poor dogs will go without 
food seems beyond belief. 

I once had a team of nineteen fat 
Eskimo dogs that went six or seven days 
between meals for three consecutive feed- 
ings before they reached the journey's 
end and good food ; and, although they 
all looked very thin, and were, no doubt, 
very weak, none of them died ; and yet 
they had been traveling and dragging a 
heavy sledge for a great part of the 
time. Other travelers amongr the Eskimo 
have given equally wonderful accounts of 
their powers of fasting. The Eskimo 
have many times of want and depriva- 
tion, and then their poor dogs must 
suffer very much. But when they are 
fed every other day on good fat walrus 



HOW THEIR HOUSES ARE BUILT. 



39 



meat, and do not have too much hard 
work to do, they will get as fat and saucy 
and playful as your own dogs with three 
meals a day. One of the very last 
things you would imagine to be good for 
them is the best food they get ; that is, 
tough walrus hide, about an inch in 
thickness, and as wiry as sole-leather. 
Give your team of dogs a good me-al of 
this before they start, take along a light 
supply of it for them, and you can be 
gone a couple of weeks on a trip ; when 
you get back, feed them up well, and 
they will be as fat and strong as ever in a 
few days. 

But to return to the igloo. The blocks 
of snow of which the house is made are, 
it has been said, from six inches to a foot 
in thickness ; but after the house is thus 
made strong — for a heavy man can climb 



40 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

or walk right over it without tumbHng it 
in — the native architects throw a deep 
bank of loose snow over it all, burying it 
in a covering of snow from a foot to three 
feet thick ; so you can see that there is a 
good thick wall between little Boreas 
inside his home and the cold weather 
outside. This snow is thrown up with 
great wide shovels of wooden boards, 
dextrously sewed together with reindeer 
sinew, and the handle in the center made 
of a curved piece of musk-ox horn. 
The inner edge of the shovel, which 
would soon wear off digging in the hard, 
frozen snows, is protected by a tip made 
from the toughest part of a reindeer's 
horn. A snow-shovel is always carried 
by the Eskimo on their travels. The 
knives with which they cut the blocks of 
snow are like great long-bladed butcher- 



HOW THEIR HOUSES ARE BUILT. ' 41 

knives, with handles of wood long 
enough to be grasped easily and firmly 
with both hands. Sometimes they use a 




AN ESKIMO KNIFE AND SNOW-SHOVEL. 

saw where they can get it by tradingwith 
the sailors who come into certain parts 
of their seas to catch whales, walrus and 
seals. 

But will not every one under such a 



42 



THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 



thick house of snow, with the snow-door 
tightly fastened up to keep out the dogs 
and cold, smother to death for want of 
fresh air ? And if they do not smother, 
where does the fresh air come from ? 
The frozen snow is about as porous 
as white sugar, and all boys and girls 
know they can draw in air through a 
lump of it, or, if they do not know it, 
they can try the experiment. Well, in 
the same way, the cold air from the out- 
side passes very slowly through the thick 
snow wall as fast as the people inside use 
up that in the igloo ; not so fast but that 
they can warm it with their little stone 
lamps as it comes in, unless there is a 
strong gale of wind on the outside to 
blow it through. I was at one time i'n a 
very thick igloo, probably four feet 
through, but the snow was very hard and 



HOW THEIR HOUSES ARE BUILT. 43 

sandy, and would not pack down well, and 
as there was a very heavy wind blowing 
at the time, the i^loo was so cold that we 
all had to go to bed under the thick rein- 
deer robes to keep warm. Holding a 
burning candle near the wall of snow on 
the side from which the Sfale was comine, 
the flame was bent over nearly one-third 
or half way toward the center of the 
igloo. 

If the igloo becomes very warm inside 
by the lamp's using up too much of the 
air, the heat ascends to the top and soon 
cuts its way through the soft snow in the 
chinks of the snow-blocks, and these 
little chimneys soon afford a sufficient 
amount of fresh air. If they give too 
much, they are " chinked up " with a 
handful of snow taken from the front of 
the snow bed. 



CHAPTER III. 

LITTLE BOREAS'S PLAYTHINGS. 

ATOW that you know all about little 
^ * Boreas's home, let us find out what 
he has been doing. We left him rolling 
about on the reindeer skins of the snow 
bed, in a house built of snow, where it 
must nearly always be below freezing 
to prevent the house from melting down. 
Well, as the Eskimo must sometime be 
babies, so the dogs must at sometime be 
puppies, and the puppies are allowed 
inside the z£-loo on the bed, where they 



LITTLE BOREAS' S FLA Y THINGS. 45 

are the favorite playthings of the young 
heir. His mother makes him a number 
of doll dog-harnesses for the puppies, 
fixes him up a dog-whip almost like his 
father's, and then he amuses himself 
harnessing them, hitching them to a 
hatchet, the water-bucket, or any object 
that is at hand, and driving them around 
in the igloo and storm igloo, or out 
of doors, when the weather is very 
pleasant. 

By this time, of course, little Boreas 
is able to walk, and he has a nice suit of 
clothes for outdoor wear, made of the 
softest skins of the reindeer fawns, 
trimmed with rabbit and eider-duck skin. 
As soon as the puppies get a little 
bigger, the larger boys take them in 
hand, and by the time they are old 
enough to be used for work in the 



46 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

sledges, they are almost well-trained 
-dogs without knowing just when their 
schooling commenced. 

And so with little Boreas ; when he 
gets older he takes the dogs his younger 
brother finds unmanageable and trains 
them, and by the time he is a young man, 
he is a good dog-driver, and knows how 
to manage a sledge under all circum- 
stances. This is the hardest thing that 
an Eskimo has to learn. I have known 
white men to equal them in rowing in 
their little seal-skin canoes ; I have seen 
white men build good igloos ; but I have 
never seen a white man who was a good 
dog-driver ; and the Eskimo told me that 
they had never seen such an one either. 
When they drive their dogs, it is in 
the shape of a letter V, the foremost dog 
being at the converging point, and the 




AN ESKIMO TEAM OF DOGS. 



LITTLE BOREAS' S PLA YTHINGS. 49 

harness traces running back in V-shape 
to the sledge, as shown in the accom- 
panying sketch. The forward dog is 
called the " leader," or " chief," and in 
trading dogs, a " leader " is worth two 
good followers, or ordinary workers. 
The Eskimo dog-driver manages the 
leader wholly by the voice, making him 
stop, go ahead, to the right, or to the 
left, as he may speak to him ; and as he 
acts, so do the others, who soon learn to 
watch him closely, and strangest of all, 
to obey him even after they are unhar- 
nessed, although " the leader " may not 
be one of the largest and strongest dogs 
in the team. 

The Eskimo children have but few 
toys, and these are only of the rud- 
est kind. Yet it is surprising to see 
the amount of enjoyment they get from 



50 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

these trifling affairs, so easily are they 
amused. 

One of the most common toys that I 
found in use among them was called 1100- 
glook-took or noo-glook-tahk, or, as it 
miofht be called in our lan^uao-e, " Pin 
and Cup-ball." On page 53 is seen an end 
and side view of the toy. It consists of 
two pieces, generally of walrus ivory, 
united by a string of reindeer sinew 
about six inches long. The ivory or 
wooden pin is about as long as the fore- 
finger, and its smaller end is sharpened 
to about the size of a knitting-needle. 
One end of the ivory "cup-ball" is bored 
as full of holes as possible, and the 
object of the game is simply to impale 
the "cup-ball" on the pin by thrusting 
the latter in one of the holes. This is 
done, as shown in the illustration, by 



LITTLE BOREAS' S PLAYTHINGS. 



S3 



swinging the "cup-ball" backward and 
forward once or twice and then bringing 




PIN AND CUP-BALL. 



it around with a gentle sweep, the end 
containing the holes being turned toward 
the pin. 

Simple as this little toy is, it requires 
considerable dexterity and skill to make 
the run of a number of successful points, 
which is often accomplished by a little 
Eskimo. Sometimes he will swing it 
completely around two or three times, 
alternating on different sides of the 
hand, and an expert player will in this 



54 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

manner swing it so rapidly that it looks 
like a revolving buzz-saw, and will then, 
with a sharp crack, impale it on the pin. 
I remember that I tried it once, and 
brought the heavy ivory ball so sharply 
against the end of my thumb-nail that it 
stung for half an hour after. The most 
expert, however, will always succeed in 
sticking it on the pin, or in catx^hing it 
on the pin's point between the holes, so 
that the ball will bounce back. A num- 
ber of holes are also cut obliquely in the 
sides of the ball, as shown on page 53, so 
that if it flies sidewise it may be caught 
by the pin through one of these ; and> 
in fact, those who desire to show unusual 
skill try to impale the ball on one of 
these side holes. Should they fail in 
this endeavor, the thumb-nail or thumb- 
joint usually gets a whack that makes 



LITTLE BOREAS' S PL A Y THINGS. 55 

the player squirm for some time ; but, 
with that indifference to bodily pain so 
characteristic of savages, they go right 
on with their play, notwithstanding the 
hurt. In a village of half a dozen fami- 
lies, you will nearly always see a group 
of little children, especially the girls, 
twirling away at this game. As soon as 
one misses they pass it on to the next, 
the number of successful catches show- 
ing who is victor for that particular 
round. 

Another childish amuse- 
ment is to take one of the 
musk-ox cups, shown on 
this page, and, partially fill- 
ing it with soup or stew, 
whirl it around upon a board or flat 
rock in the center of a group collected 
to play the game ; the person to whom 




A MUSK-OX CUP. 



56 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

the handle of the cup points when it 
has stopped turning is the victor, and 
can appropriate the contents of the cup. 
This game is not so much played by the 
children as by the old women of the 
tribe, and I am sorry to say that this 
simple game is often used by them as a 
means of gambling. When the person 
to whom the handle has pointed has 
taken out the article placed in the cup 
(or alongside it, if it be too large), some 
other article must be placed in It or 
alongside it, and a brisk twirl is then 
given it that sends it spinning around 
again for four or five times before it 
settles to a rest and the handle desig- 
nates the new victor. I have said this 
is a kind of gambling, because the lucky 
one often puts in the musk-ox horn cup 
thinofs much more valuable than are 



LITTLE BOREAS' S PLAYTHINGS. gy 

taken out, the only idea of value among 
the Eskimo being the present necessity 
for an article. A needle that is wanted 
for use immediately is more valuable in 
their eyes than the horn cup which holds 
it, although it may have taken them a 
month to make the cup. 

The making of these curious cups of 
musk-ox horn is worth relating. If my 
readers will look in some well-illustrated 
book on natural history, they will see 
that the horjj of a musk-ox, as it ap- 
proaches his head, commences to flatten 
out in a wide plate that is crimpled 
at the edges. The Eskimo take this 
widened base of the musk-oxen's horn, 
boil it in their kettles, and then scrape 
it with knives to get it into the proper 
thickness, after which it is bent in the 
shape seen in the illustration, and is then 



58 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

left to dry. Little toy ones are often 
made for the babies to play with, but most 
of them are large and hold from a pint to 
a couple of quarts. The little girls 
often play with the irn-vioo-sik, as they 
call this cup, the victor's winnings being 
a little bit of soup poured into the 
cup. 

Another game, also called noo-glook- 
took, is played by the men and boys. A 
piece of walrus ivory, about as long as 
the forefinger and probably a little larger 
in diameter, is pierced near the middle 
with holes running entirely through, and 
as thickly placed as can be without cut- 
ting it in two. Through each extremity 
is passed a stout sinew string, one end 
of which holds it fast to the roof of the 
igloo, or tent, while the other is tied to 
some heavy object, as a walrus's skull or 



LITTLE BOREAS' S PLAYTHINGS. 6i 

a stone, which acts as a weight and 
keeps both strings taut. 

Some member of the playing party 
then puts up something as a prize — a 
pair of walrus's tusks, or perhaps, a rein- 
deer coat. The players, who stand in a 
circle around the perforated ivory cyl- 
inder, arm themselves with long, sharp- 
ened sticks, with points small enough to 
enter the holes (such as seal spears with 
the barbs removed, or iron ramrods), 
and are then ready to commence ; and 
as the prize-giver gives a sudden shout 
of *' Yi ! Yi ! " they all begin jabbing at 
the holes. Finally, some lucky fellow 
succeeds in thrusting the point of his 
stick, spear, or ramrod through one of 
the holes, when he loudly shouts " Yi ! 
Yi ! " and pushes the cylinder aside to 
siiOw that he is winner, and the jabbing 



62 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

ceases. The victor now puts up some 
new prize — a musk-ox robe, or a sledge 
dog", or a seal-skin line — and the game 
goes on as usual until all are ready to 
stop. This is a favorite game during 
the lono- winter evenina:o when food is 
plentiful and every body is merry. 

Many of the little Eskimo girls have 
dolls, dressed very much like themselves, 
and made entirely by their own hands. 
The face is of tanned seal-skin, about as 
black as their own, two round beads 
being sewed in for eyes and a couple of 
long ones for nose and mouth. The 
rest of the doll is clothed in reindeer 
skin, the same as its little mistress when 
she is out in the winter's cold. The 
little Eskimo girls do not seem to take 
as kindly to their dolls or to derive as 
much amusement from their assumed 



LITTLE BOREAS' S PLAYTHIMGS. 63 

care and trouble with them as do our 
little girls of the temperate zone. They 
seem to prefer other and rougher enjoy^ 
ments. 

I give here a 
picture of a doll, 
which was given 
me by a little 
Eskimo girl, in 
return for a 
present that I 
had made her, as 
Is the usual Es- 
kimo custom; 
and I think my 
little girl readers, when they see its 
hideous countenance, with its glistening 
bead eyes and straight bead nose, and es- 
pecially the fierce grimace of its straight 
bead mouth, will cease to wonder why 




AN ESKIMO DOLL, 



64 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

their Eskimo sisters do not grow enthu- 
siastic over their dolls. In fact, I can 
readily imagine that most of you will say 
that you don't see how in the world they 
can like them at all. The face of the 
doll's hood is trimmed with black fur, 
taken from the back of the reindeer. 
The rest of the dress, except a little 
trimming around the bottom of the coat, 
is made of white reindeerfur, taken from 
the flanks of the animal. The belt is of 
black seal-skin, secured by a brass-headed 
tack, and the gloves of dark-colored 
reindeerfur. The stockingrs are made 
from the flat glossy fur taken from the 
legs of a young reindeer, and many of 
these show very creditable ornamenta- 
tion, considering the limited display of 
colors to be found on a single reindeer 
skin. Over the feet are drawn seal-skin 



LITTLE BOREAS' S PL A Y THINGS. 65 

leather slippers, securely fastened by a 
\ puckering string, drawn tight and tied. 
These prevent the water from getting at 
the reindeer stockings, the fur of which 
would be spoiled by the moisture. 
Except for its hideous face, the Eskimo 
doll, queer as it looks to you, is generally 
a very good miniature representation of 
the Eskimo girl. 



CHAPTER IV, 

ESKIMO SLEDS — COASTING. 

'T^HE number of toys that represent 
-*■ articles of daily use, and which are 
so common among us, such as toy wagons, 
toy sleds, toy railroad trains, and a 
hundred others, are very limited among 
the Eskimo ; and most of their amuse- 
ments, as I have said, are confined to 
their simple games. If you should 
wish to make a toy sledge, you, of 
course, would need to have some wood 
to build it from. I have told you of 



ESKIMO SLEDS— COASTING. 



t)7 



the scarcity of wood among the Eskimo, 
and what funny notions some of them 
have about timber growing on the bot- 
tom of the sea and the drifting ice break- 
ing it off. Well, since wood is so scarce 
that all they can get must be utilized to 




A SLED MADE OF ICE. 



make their real sleds, harpoon and spear 
shafts, etc., leaving none or very little to 
be made into toy representations of 
these things, little Boreas looks else- 
where for material for his coasting sled ; 
and he makes it of — what do you think? 



68 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

— the very funniest material imagina- 
ble — pure ice, cut from the nearest lake 
or river. 

If the sleds of ice, judging from the 
one in the illustration, seem rather 
bulky, they are much stronger than you 
would imagine, and the boys can coast 
downhill without breaking them, pro- 
vided the changes in the slope are 
gradual and there are no stones or ice- 
hummocks protruding through the snow. 
Even the grown people occasionally use 
these primitive sledges when dragging 
their effects over the smooth salt-water 
ice near the shore-line of the sea. The 
snow-knife, which I represented among 
the tools that are used to build the igloo, 
or native snow house, is the implement 
employed to cut or chip out the ice- 
sledge. There is one advantage to be 



ESKIMO SLEDS— COASTIXG. 69 

found in this kind of a sledge that par- 
tially compensates for its great weight : 
the bottom of the sledge-runners are 
always perfectly smooth and slipper)% 
being of pure ice : and when the sledge 
party is on hard and level snow, but little 
pulling is required — much less, in fact, 
than one would think — to make rapid 
progress with such a bulky and cumber- 
some vehicle. 

So much easier will a sledge pull 
when it has runners of ice, that, in the 
Eskimo country^, the ordinary" wooden 
sledges always have the bottoms of their 
runners iced before the}- start on a day's 
sledge journey. First, the sledge runner 
is shod with a strip of bone cut from the 
lower iaw of a whale into a long-, thin 
piece, like a batten, or small board, and a 
trifle wider than the runner. This is 



70 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

made fast to the runner by thin thongs 
of whalebone. The sledge is thrown on 
its back, the slats being down, and the 
native sledgeman prepares the runners 
for the journey, by carefully icing them. 
He has a small bucket or musk-ox ladle 
full of water, and, picking up a piece of 
snow about as big as his fist, he dips it in 
the water to render it soft and slushy. 
and then presses the slushy mass over 
the bone shoe of the runner with the 
open palm of the hand until it is com- 
pletely covered around and along the 
whole length of both runners. The 
open hand is kept working backward and 
forward over two or three feet of the 
runner's length, smoothing and leveling 
this opaque mass until it is frozen hard 
(a process which generally takes only 
about half a minute in cold weather") ; 



ESKIMO SLEDS— COASTIXV. -i 

then the operation is renewed farther on 
along the runner. The slushy snow being 
completely frozen, the next operation is 
to put on the ice itself. This is done by 
the sledgeman taking a big mouthful of 
water and, while he works the palm of 
his hand backward and forward very 
rapidly, slowly spurting the water over 
the frozen, slushy snow ; this distributes 
the water evenly and smoothly, and the 
watery spray freezes almost as soon as it 
strikes the cold runner. Thus iced, it is 
really wonderful how much easier the 
sledgfe Avill run than when it is not so 
treated. ]\Iy largest sledge was so 
heavy, even when unloaded, that I could 
hardly turn it over sidewise ; 3'et. when 
Toolooah, m.y sledgeman, had carefull}'^ 
iced it, I could with one hand take this 
ponderous affair, weighing nearly half 



72 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

a ton, and slide it backward and forward 
a distance of two or three feet without 
any unusual effort. If Toolooah iced 
the sledge on the side of a hill, and, 
thoughtlessly turning it over, allowed it 
to point downhill, away it would go like 
a frightened horse, unless it was stopped. 

Our worst luck would be to have some 
half-hidden stone tear the ice from one 
of the runners, when it would drag as if 
a treble-sized load had been added. But 
whether little Boreas's sled be made of 
ice or wood he is nearly as fond of a 
sled-ride as the little boys in better cli- 
mates, and probably would be found as 
often in the week enjoying one, if his 
winter time were as short ; but as his 
winter is three or four times as long as 
ours, he grows tired of the sport, in time. 

Most of the sled-rides of our boys are 



ESKIMO SLEDS— COASTING. 73 

on some of the nice sloping side-hills, 
while nearly all of those of little Boreas 
are behind well-trained dogs, which carry 
him along as fast as a pair of good 
horses. They go "coasting" quite often, 
however, if they can find a good hill for 
the purpose, which they can not always 
find, because most of the tops and ridges 
of the hills in their country are kept 
clear of the snow by the terrible gales of 
wind that they have so often. 

One sport that amuses the Eskimo 
boys very much would probably be called 
in our language '' reindeer hunting." 
Having found a long and gently slope on 
a side-hill, they place along the bottom 
of the hill a number of reindeer antlers, 
or, as we sometimes incorrectly call 
them, deer-horns (for you boys must not 
forget that the antlers of a deer are not 



74 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

horn at all, but bone.) These antlers of 
the reindeer are stuck upright in the 
snow, singly or in groups, in such a 
manner that a sled, when well guided, 
can be run between them without knock- 
ing any of them down, the number of 
open spaces between the groups being 
equal to at least the number of sleds. 
The quantity of reindeer antlers they can 
thus arrange will, of course, depend upon 
their fathers' success the autumn before 
in reindeer hunting ; but there are nearly 
always enough antlers to give two or 
three, and sometimes five or six, to each 
fearless young coaster. 

The boys with their sleds, numbering 
from four to six in a fair-sized village, 
gather on the top of the hill, each boy 
having with him two or three spears, or 
a bow with as many arrows. They start 




REINDEER HUXTIXG. 



ESKIMO SLEDS— COASTING. . 77 

together, each boy's object being to 
knock down as many antlers as possible 
and not be the first to reach the bottom 
of the hill. You can see that, in such a 
case, the slower they go when they are 
passing the antlers the better. They 
must knock over the antlers with their 
spears or arrows only, as those thrown 
down by the sledge or with the bow or 
spear in the hand do not count. They 
begin to shoot their arrows and throw 
their spears as soon as they can get 
within effective shooting distance ; and, 
even after they have passed between 
the rows of antlers, the more active boys 
will turn around on their flying sleds and 
hurl back a spear or arrow with suf^cient 
force to bring down an antler. 

When all have reached the bottom of 
the hill, they return to the rows of ant- 



78 



THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 



lers, where each boy picks out those he 
has rightfully captured, and places them 
in a pile by themselves. Then those 




A FAVORITE GAME. 



accidentally knocked over by the sledges 
are again put up and the boys return for 
another dash down the hill, until all the 
antlers have been " speared." Some- 



ESKIMO SLEDS-COASTING. 79 

times there is but one antler left, and 
when there are five or six contesting 
sleds the race becomes very exciting, for 
then speed counts in reaching the antler 
first. When all are down, the boys 
count their winnings, and the victor is, 
of course, the one who has obtained the 
greatest number of antlers. 



CHAPTER V. 

FEEDING THE DOGS. 

/^NE of the first toys that httle Bo- 
^-^ reas has is a small bow of whalebone 
or light wood ; and sitting on the end of 
the snow bed he shoots his toy arrows, 
under the direction of his father or 
mother or some one else who cares to 
play with him, at something on the 
other side of the snow house. This is 
usually a small piece of boiled meat, of 
which he is very fond, stuck in a crack 
between the snow blocks ; and if he hits 



FEEDING THE DOGS. gl 

it, he is entitled to eat it as a regard, 
although little Boreas seldom needs such 
encouragement to stimulate him in his 
plays, so lonesome and long are the 
dreary winter days in which he lives 
buried beneath the snow. 

These toy arrows are pointed with 
pins but he is also furnished with blunt 
arrows, and whenever some inquisitive 
dog pokes his head in the igloo door, 
looking around for a stray piece of meat 
or blubber to steal, little Boreas, if he 
shoots straight, will hit him upon the 
nose or head with one of the blunt 
arrows, and the dog will beat a hasty 
retreat. In this sense, the little Eskimo 
boy has plenty of targets to shoot at, for 
the igloo door is nearly always filled with 
the heads of two or three dogs watching 
Boreas's mother closely ; and if she turns 



82 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

her head or back for a moment, they will 
make a rush to steal something, and to 
get out as soon as possible, before she 
can pound them over the head with a 
club that she keeps for that purpose. 

In these exciting raids of a half-dozen 
hungry dogs, little Boreas is liable to 
get, by all odds, the w^orst of the encoun- 
ter. He is too small to be noticed, and 
the first big dog that rushes by him 
knocks him over ; the next probably 
rolls him off the bed to the floor ; 
another upsets the lamp full of oil on 
him ; and while he is reeking with oil, 
another big- doo-, takino- him for a seal- 
skin full of blubber, tries to drag him 
out, when his mother happens to rescue 
him after she has accidentally pommeled 
him two or three times with the club 
with which she is striking at the dogs ; 



FEEDING THE DOGS. 85 

and if it were not for his hideous yelling 
and crying, one would hardly know what 
he is, so covered is he with dirt, grease, 
and snow. Thus the dogs occasionally 
have their revenue on little Boreas for 
whacking them over the nose with his 
toy arrows, although this is not their 
object in rushing into the igloo, for the 
real cause is their ravenous hunoer. 

The duty of feeding the dogs is often 
intrusted to the boys, and it is no easy 
work. The most common food for the 
dogs is walrus-skin, about an inch to an 
inch and a half thick, cut in strips each 
about as wide as it is thick, and from a 
foot to eighteen inches long. The dog 
swallows one of these strips as he would 
a snake ; and it is so tough that when he 
has swallowed about twelve pieces, it is 
no great wonder that he does not want 



86 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

any thing more for two days. Some- 
times they cut the food up into little 
pieces inside the igloo, where the dogs 
can not trouble them, and then throw it 
out on the snow ; but this is not alto- 
gether a good way ; for then the little 
dogs get it all while the big dogs are 
fighting, for these big burly fellows are 
sure to have an unnecessary row over 
each feeding. If pieces too large to 
swallow at a gulp are thrown out, the 
large dogs get the food ; and so, between 
the big dogs and the little ones, the 
Eskimo boys have a hard time making 
an equal distribution among the animals. 
When they are anxious for a fair 
division, only one dog at a time is let 
into the igloo, a couple of boys standing 
at the door with sticks in their hands to 
prevent the other dogs from entering. 



FEEDING THE DOGS. 89 

When it is pleasant weather out of doors 
they often build a semi-circular wall three 
or four snow blocks higfh, and behind 
this a couple of men cut up the meat, 
blubber or walrus-hide, and allow but one 
dog at a time to come in, three or four 
boys with long whips, their lashes fifteen 
or twenty feet in length, standing near 
the open part of the wall to keep the 
ravenous pack from making a raid. 
Once or twice I have known dogs to 
come bounding over the hiofh wall, crush- 
ing in the snow blocks on the men who 
were chopping the meat, and stealing 
several pieces before the boys had 
finished beating the mingled dogs and 
men with their whips. 

One winter night, I remember, while 
on our sledge-journey, returning to 
North Hudson's Bay, Toolooah was 



9° 



THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 



feeding his dogs with no one to help him. 
He was on his knees near the igloo door, 
and throwing the bits to the various 
dogs, the heads of which were crowded 
in the entrance, and he was distributing 
the food as well as was possible under 
the circumstances. One big dog, which 
he could not distinguish in the dark 
entrance, and which, after it had received 
its share, had driven all the other dogs 
away, seemed determined not to leave. 
Toolooah grew angry, seized his stick, 
and rushed out after it to settle matters. 
But he came rushing back even faster 
than he went out, seized his gun hur- 
riedly, and as hastily was gone again. 
Before we could collect our thouo^hts in 
order, or surmise what it all could mean, 
a shot was heard outside, and in a few 
seconds more Toolooah came crawling 



FEEDING THE I>OGS. 91 

in, dragging a big wolf after him, its 
white fangs showing in its black mouth 
in a way that made us shudder. This 
was the big dog Toolooah had been feed- 
ing, but it did not understand the cus- 
toms of the Eskimo dogfs well enoucrh to 
know that it must stop eating when only 
half satisfied ; and this ignorance cost it 
its life. 

The wolves of the Arctic, by the way, 
are much larger, more powerful and 
ferocious than those seen in our country ; 
and when pressed with hunger, they do 
not hesitate at all to make a meal off the 
Eskimo dogs, which they kill and eat at 
the very door of the igloo, if not pre- 
vented in some way. They are very 
much afraid of a bright light, however, 
and they will not come around a village 
or even a single zgloo so long as they see 



92 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

even a small flame, so that it Is generally 
late in the night, when the lamp is burn- 
ing low or has gone out, that they make 
their attacks on the dogs, four or five of 
them often killingf or maiming; two or 
three times as many dogs. 




HUNTING THE MUSK-OX 



CHAPTER VI, 

SOME OUTDOOR SPORTS. 

'T^HE Eskimo boys have a way of play- 
-^ ing at musk-ox hunting that is very 
vigorous and earnest. In April, 1879, 
when I was on a sledge-journey to King 
William's Land, we came upon a herd of 
musk-oxen that we had sighted the day 
before, and after running them with dogs 
for a mile or two, the herd was sur- 
rounded, or "brought to bay," as hunters 
would say, and a number of the musk- 
oxen killed. Of course we picked out 



94 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

some of the handsomest robes and put 
them on our sledges, and the next day 
we proceeded on our journey. During 
that day we passed several musk-ox trails 
in the snow, and it was very clear that 
we were in a country where these ani- 
mals were quite numerous. After going 
into camp that evening between two 
slight hills that sloped down to the lake, 
where we cut throug^h the ice to oret our 
fresh water, there was a time when it 
appeared that I was the only person 
out-of-doors ; all of the rest of the 
people were inside the igloos, or snow 
huts, that had just been built, arrang- 
ing the reindeer skins for the bedding 
for the night. Suddenly, I noticed one 
of our best hunting-dogs (we had 
forty-two dogs altogether) run excit- 
edly over the hill, followed closely 



SOME OUTDOOR SPORTS. 



95 



by the remainder, one after the other. 
Then, to my great surprise, I saw two 
musk-oxen run down the farther ridge 
of the low hills ; and the pack of howl- 
ing, barking dogs soon brought them to 
bay on the ice of the lake not fifty yards 
from where the igloos were built. I 
acknowledge that I was nearly as much 
excited as the dogs over this strange and 
huge wild game, and I at once shouted 
in at the entrance of my own igloo to my 
best Eskimo hunter, Toolooah : 

" Oo-mi 11 g- m u k / oo-ming-muk ! ! " 
(Musk-oxen ! musk-oxen ! !) 

Toolooah seized his gun and ran to 
the top of the nearest ridge, about 
twenty yards away, followed by all the 
hunters in camp who had heard my out- 
cry. And then the whole band of them 
sat down in a row on the ridee and 



96 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

laughed until the air was full of the 
reindeer hair shaken from their coats 
in their convulsive mirth ; for the two 
musk-oxen proved to be only two musk- 
ox robes that we had secured the day 
before, with a boy or two under each 
robe ! 

These boys had procured the musk-ox 
robes when the sledo-es were beingr un- 
loaded, and had slipped away, unper- 
ceived by any one, while the men were 
building the snow houses. After wrap- 
ping the robes around them they had 
come down near the igloos, keeping on 
the zvindzvard side, or that side of the 
camp where the wind blowing on them 
must also pass over the camp. All 
my boy readers know that if game 
or wild animals thus pass near good 
huntinor-dog^s, the dog-s will " scent " 



SOME OUTDOOR SPORTS. 99 

them, as hunters would say. And so it 
was in this case ; and as soon as they 
were " to windward " of the little snow 
village which we were building, our keen- 
est-scented dog, Parseneuk, a beautiful, 
curly-haired, sharp-eared, lithe-built black 
fellow, that always led all chases after 
swift game, smelt the musk-ox robes, and 
— with his thoughts full of the day before, 
its exciting chase, and, better than all, its 
good fine meal of musk-ox meat — he 
dashed over the ridge to investigrate. 
The result I have stated. The poor dog 
seemed as badly sold as I had been, for 
all the camp had been drawn out by the 
excitement and noise ; and so long as the 
boys kept the shaggy robes over their 
shoulders and faces, and kept their backs 
together with their heads outward, as do 
the musk-oxen themselves when sur- 



lOO THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

rounded and brought to bay by wolves or 
dogs, our dogs kept barking and snap- 
ping and jumping at them, evidently 
thinking they were genuine musk-oxen, 
and that there was a good prospect of 
another nice dinner if they only kept the 
oxen from running away until the hunters 
came up and killed them, as in the case 
of the real musk-oxen. 

A musk-ox resembles a buffalo in ap- 
pearance, except that the musk-ox has no 
" hump " on its shoulders, and the hair 
on its robe Is two or three times as long 
as that on the buffalo (or American bison, 
as it should be called). In the winter- 
time this long hair reaches down beyond 
the knees almost to the hoofs, and when 
the musk-oxen are walkine on the soft 
snow, they sink in so that you can not 
see their legs at all. It was this long 



SOME OUTDOOR SPORTS. loi 

hair, hanging down so low as to almost 
cover the legs of the boys hidden under- 
neath the robes, that had so helped to 
deceive me when I first saw them, and 
caused me to put the whole camp in an 
uproar and thereby fasten a very good 
joke on myself — a joke that clung to me 
a long time. 

Toolooah, who was one of the most 
merry-hearted and best-natured young 
Esquimaux I ever saw, and who, as I 
have told you, was my best hunter, 
laughed until his sides were sore and his 
eyes were red ; and for several weeks 
after that he would occasionally say '' oo- 
mmo-imik / " and lauQfh until the tears ran 
down his cheeks. It was not very often 
that they had a good joke on a white 
man, and this one they seemed to enjoy 
to their hearts' content. 



^ 



I02 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

But the musk-ox hunt is not over yet 
for the boys ; in fact, the most exciting 
part is still to come. As soon as the 
mock musk-oxen are " brought to bay " 
by the excited and foolish dogs, the other 
boys get their bows and arrows and hurry 
to the spot, encouraging the dogs, which 
have now become furious and wild, and 
have formed a most ferocious circle 
around their supposed prey, all the more 
fierce where there is so unusual a num- 
ber as forty-two dogs and but two musk- 
oxen. Then with their toy arrows, which 
are specially blunted for this rough play, 
the other boys pelt the dangling robes 
in an earnest way that must often make 
the boys under the robes smart with 
pain, so heavily do the blunted arrows 
thud against them ; but these little sav- 
ages expect their plays to be very rough, 



SOME OUTDOOR SPORTS. 103 

and a whack over the knuckles that 
would break up a whole base-ball game 
of white boys, only brings out an em- 
phatic "/-jKz/" (their "ouch!") and the 
rough, harum-scarum game goes on. In 
a little while, the dogs seem to compre- 
hend that there is some foolishness about 
the matter, and begin to drop off one by 
one, in the order of their ability to see 
through the joke, and finally the game 
dies a natural death for want of the dogs 
and the noise and excitement which con- 
tribute to it. 

The boys' mock polar-bear hunt is so 
much like their musk-ox hunt that a few 
lines will describe it. One of the boys 
of the village gets a polar-bear robe, and 
wrapping it around him after he is out 
among the ice hummocks about the 
village, he comes crawling along some 



104 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

sledge-path near the igloos, when he is 
discovered by the dogs and surrounded. 
This is likely to be much rougher sport 
than that of musk-ox hunting, for the 
boys take their spears and jab away at 
their brother in the bear robe, until you 
would think they would break some of 
his ribs ; while the dogs, emboldened by 
these supposed brave advances, often- 
times take big bites of fur from the 
dangling edges of the robe. The mock 
bear rears up on his hind feet and growls 
in a very ferocious manner, until, worn 
out at last with his hard work and 
with having his head so tightly cov- 
ered up with a heavy robe, he finally 
falls over at some thrust of a spear 
and pretends to expire. But the next 
moment he crawls out from the robe, 
much to the disgust of the dogs, with 



SOME OUTDOOR SPORTS. 105 

their hopes of a fine meal of bear 
flesh. 

It is no uncommon event for a polar 
bear to prowl along the ice-floes of the 
sea-coast, which is its favorite walk, until 
it finally stumbles on an Eskimo village ; 
and if the dogs see it or smell it, it is 
very apt to be brought to bay near by, 
and then killed by some of the native 
hunters who have been alarmed by the 
noise and outcry. A fair fight on the 
open ice with a large polar bear is some- 
what dangerous, for if severely wounded 
it may tear the hunter to pieces. The 
Eskimo seldom wound any dangerous 
animals, for, being a very brave people, 
— that is, personally brave — they gener- 
ally go so close that, unless some 
accident with the fire-arms happens, 
the animal, whether it is bear or 



lo6 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

musk-ox, is usually killed at the first 
shot. 

I once found an old Eskimo hunter, 
However, in my camp in North Hudson's 
Bay, whose hair and scalp had been 
taken completely off by the bite of a 
wounded bear that he had endeavored 
to kill ; and Toolooah once fired at a big 
bear, with too hasty an aim, hoping to 
save one of his dogs that the bear had 
under its paws. He only wounded the 
huee animal, Vvhich instantlv charged 
him, and was only killed by a lucky shot 
just as it was close upon the hunter. 

Toolooah told me that he has seen 
polar bears climb up places so steep and 
perpendicular that the natives could not 
follow them without cuttino- in the wall 
of ice niches wherein to put their hands 
and feet, and even in some instances, an 




POLAR BEAR KILLING A WALRUS. 



SOME OUTDOOR SPORTS. 109 

ice-wall so high that the hunters dared 
not attempt to climb it on account of the 
danger of slipping and killing them- 
selves. A British explorer of the Arctic 
regions says that he once climbed to the 
top of an iceberg, and there found a big 
white bear sleeping away, in quiet pos- 
session. The bear, on discovering the 
party, jumped over the perpendicular 
side of the ice mountain, Jifty-one feet, 
into the sea, and swam to the nearest 
land, which was more than twenty miles 
away. 

The polar bears live on seal and wal- 
rus, crawling stealthily up to the former 
on the ice-fioes and catching them ; while 
of the walrus only the young are thus 
caught, for an old walrus is twice as big 
as Bruin. Some Arctic explorers, how- 
ever — Captain Hall and Dr. Rae among 



no THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

Others — state that the bears sometimes 
surprise an old walrus by climbing above 
him on a precipitous hill, or the walls of 
an iceberg, and then taking stones or 
huge pieces of ice in their forepaws and 
throwing them with such force as to 
crack the walrus's skull as he lies asleep 
or at rest upon the ice. Then the 
bears spring down on the stunned walrus 
and finisn him. 




AN UNWELCOME VISITOR 



CHAPTER VII. 

ESKIMO CANDY. 

TT would seem very strange, and per- 
haps not very pleasant, to my young 
readers to hear a tallow candle or the 
shin-bone of a reindeer called candy. 
And yet these things may really be con- 
sidered as Eskimo candy, because they 
would delight the children of the cold in 
precisely the way that a box of bon-bons 
would delight you. 

There is a certain kind of water-fowl 
in Arctic countries known as the dovekie. 



THE CHILDREN OF IHE COLD. 



It is about the size of a duck, is quite 
black, has a prominent white stripe on 
its wings, and its webbed feet are of a 
brilliant red. When sitting in rows on 
the edge of some mossy, dark-green 
rock, these little red feet are very con- 
spicuous, and, together with the white 
stripes on the wings, make the dovekie a 
very pretty bird. Sometimes, when the 
men have killed a 
number of dovekies, 
the Eskimo women 
cut off the bright red 
feet, draw out the 




ESKIMO CAXDY 



bones, and, blowing into the skins, distend 
them as much as possible so as to form 
pouches. When these pouches are thor- 
oughly dried they are 
filled w i t h reindeer 
tallow, and the bright 
red packages, which 
I assure you look 
much nicer than they 
taste, are little Bo- 
reas's candy. In very 
cold weather the Es- 
kimo children eat 
great quantities of fat 
and blubber ; and this 
fatty food, which 
seems to us so un- 




iM 



THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 



inviting, helps to keep them warm and 
well. 

The only other kind of candy that the 
Eskimo children have, is the marrow 
from the long leof or shin-bone of the 
slaughtered reindeer. Of this, also, they 
are very fond. Whenever a reindeer is 
killed and the meat has been stripped 
from the bones of the legs, these bones 
are placed on the floor of the igloo and 
cracked with a hatchet until the marrow 
is exposed. The bones are then forced 
apart with the hands, and the marrow is 
dug out of the ends with a long, sharp 
and narrow spoon made from a walrus's 
tusk. I have eaten this reindeer mar- 
row frozen and cooked; and after one 
becomes accustomed to eating frozen 
meat raw, it is really an acceptable tid- 
bit ; while cooked and nicely served, it 



ESKIMO CANDY. 115 

would be a delicacy anywhere. Some- 
times, if Toolooah was unusually lucky, 
he would have eiofht or ten reindeer on 
hand that he had killed during the day, 
and as each deer has eio^ht leQ^-bones. 
from which the marrow can be extracted, 
quite a meal could be made from this 
very peculiar candy 



CHAPTER Vni. 

ATHLETIC AMiJSEMENTS. 

'T'^HERE is one kind of play in which 
■*- the Eskimo boys seem always ready 
to indulge — a roll downhill.' They select 
a small but steep hill, or incline, well-cov- 
ered with snow, and, seating themselves 
on the top of the ridge, thrust their 
heads between their legs, pass their 
clinched, gloved hands over their ankles, 
pressing their legs as closely against 
their bodies as possible.x They thus 
really make themselves into big balls 




ESKIMO BOVS ROLLING DOWN A HILL. II7 



ATHLETIC AMUSEMENTS. 



119 



covered with reindeer hair, and then 
away they go on a rolling race downhill, 
suddenly spreading themselves out at 
full length, and stopping instantly at the 
bottom of the hill. Every now and then 
when a playful mood strikes a boy, he 




OH ! SUCH FUN. 

will double himself up and roll downhill 
without waiting for the rivalry of a race, 
but it is violent exercise, and it bumps 
the little urchin severely. 



i20 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

Another athletic amusement in which 
the boys indulge, and which requires a 
great deal of strength, is a peculiar kind 
of short race on the hands and feet. 
The boys lean forward on their hands 
and feet, with their arms and legs held as 
stiffly as possible, and under no circum- 
stances must they bend either the elbows 
or knees. In this stiff and rigid position, 
resting only on their feet and on the 
knuckles of their clinched fists, they 
jump or hitch forward a couple of inches 
by a quick, convulsive movement of the 
whole body. These movements are 
rapidly repeated, perhaps once or twice 
in a second, until the contestants have 
covered two or three yards along the 
hard snow-drifts. Then they become 
exhausted, for, as I have already said, 
this exercise calls for considerable 



ATHLETIC AMUSEMENTS. 123 

Strength, and is indeed a very fatiguing 
amusement ; so that, by the time a boy 
has played quite energetically in this 
way, if only for a minute, he feels very 
tired, and is willing to take a breathing 
spell. It is not a very graceful game, 
and if you were to take a carpenter's 
wooden horse and jog it along by short 
jerks over the floor, you would have a 
tolerably fair representation of this awk- 
ward game of the Eskimo children. 
The best part of it all is the exercise it 
gives them, and often one will see a 
single boy jumping along in this stiff- 
legged fashion as if he were practicing 
for a race, a slight downhill grade being 
preferred. 

Another method of racingf, somewhat 
similar to the above, is also practiced ; 
folding the arms across the breast, and 



124 ^^-^ CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

holding the knees firmly rigid, with 
the feet close together, the contestants 
paddle along as fast as possible by short 
jumps of an inch or two. It is a severe 
strain on the feet, and one cannot go 
very far in so awkward a way. The 
little girls, standing in a row of from 
three to five, often jump up and down in 
the same manner, keeping a sort of time 
with the thumping of their heels to the 
rude songs that they are spluttering out 
in short jerks and gasps, as unmusical as 
the hammering of their heels. A lot of 
these little damsels would favor us with 
a short version of this stilT-jumping, 
spluttering melody whenever they were 
particularly grateful for some small gift 
we had presented to them. 

A capital game played by the little 
girls, and by some of the smaller boys, is 



ATHLETIC AMUSEMENTS. 127 

a rude sort of ball-game. Thick seal-skin 
leather is made into a ball about the size 
of our common base-ball, and then filled 
about two-thirds full with sand. If com- 
pletely filled, it would be as hard and 
unyielding as a stone, and the singular 
sliding way it has of yielding because of 
its being only partially filled, makes it 
much harder to catch and retain in the 
hands than our common ball. The game 
is a very simple one, much like our play 
with bean-bags, and consists simply in 
striking at the ball with the open palm 
of the hand, and, when there is a crowd 
of players, in keeping the ball constantly 
in the air. This is a favorite summer 
game when the snow is off the ground 
and the people are living in seal-skin 
tents. No doubt it affords considerable 
exercise. Whenever the ball drops to 



128 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

the ground, or the players fail to keep 
it flying, it is a signal for a rest. Simple 
as is the game, the little Eskimo manage 
to gain much fun and excitement from 
it, and whenever you hear an unusual 
amount of shouting and loud and bois- 
terous merriment out-of-doors, you may 
be almost certain of finding, when you 
go to your tent door, that all the chil- 
dren of the village are engaged in a 
game of " sand-bag ball." 

A favorite Eskimo amusement is one 
which both the white and Indian boys 
sometimes play with the bow and arrow. 
It is to see how many arrows can be kept 
in the air at one time. The Eskimo 
boy, with his quiver pulled around over 
his shoulders so that he can get the 
arrows quickly and readily, commences 
shooting them straight up into the air, 



ATHLETIC AMUSEMENTS, 



129 



and when the first arrow thus shot up 
strikes the ground, he must at once stop. 
The number of arrows he has shot indi- 
cates his score, which he will compare 
with that made by the other boys. 
Sometimes they will only count those 
that in descending stand upright in the 
snow, and in this case they will shoot all 
that are in their quivers. 

At another time they will count only 
those that stick upright within a certain 
area, generally a circle of from twenty to 
thirty yards in diameter ; these must all 
be shot from the bow by the time the 
first arrow strikes within the space 
marked out, and in this case considerable 
precision and rapidity in shooting are 
required to make a good score. The 
boys will often shoot a single arrow high 
into the air and try to intercept it with 



I JO THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

another one sent straight horizontally 
above the ground as the first one rapidly 
descends. The Eskimo and Indians and 
other savag-e tribes who are skilled in the 
use of the bow and arrow, can shoot an 
arrow so that it will go somewhat side- 
wise. They practice this way of shoot- 
ing when trying to hit a descending 
arrow, or one stuck upright in the 
ground. It must, however, be remem- 
bered that the Eskimo are not as good 
bowmen as are many of the other savage 
tribes, who gain a part or all of their 
living by this instrument; the Eskimo use 
spears and lances much more frequently, 
and where accuracy is especia/ly needed, 
bows are seldom employed. With those 
Eskimo who come into frequent contact 
with white men, guns have now altogether 
taken the place of bows and arrows. 



J THLE 7 IC A M U SEMEN TS. 131 

Another Eskimo out-of-door amuse- 
ment much resembles the old Indian 
game of "Lacrosse." It is played on 
the smooth lake ice, with three or four 
small round balls of quartz or granite, 
about the size of an English walnut. 
These are kicked and knocked about 
the lake, with plenty of fun and shouting, 
but utterly without any rules to govern 
the game. 

It takes a long time to grind one of 
these irregular pieces of stone into a 
round ball, but the Eskimo people are 
very patient and untiring in their rou- 
tine work, and with them, as with the 
Indians, time is of hardly any consequence 
whatever. The number of years that they 
will spend in plodding away at the most 
simple things shows them to be probably 
the most patient people in the world. 



CHAPTER IX. 

ESKIMO PATIENCE. 

\T7HEN we were near King Williams 
^ ^ Land, I saw an Eskimo working up- 
on a knife that, as nearly as I could ascer- 
tain, had engaged a good part of his time 
some six years preceding that date. He 
had a flat piece of iron, which had been 
taken from the wreck of one of Sir John 
Franklin's ships, and from this he was 
endeavoring to make a knife-blade, which, 
when completed, would be about twelve 
inches long. In cutting it from this iron 



ESKIMO PATIENCE. 133 

plate he was using for a chisel an old 
file, found on one of the ships, which it 
had taken him two or three years to 
sharpen by rubbing its edge against 
stones and rocks. His cold-chisel fin- 
ished, he had been nearly as many years 
cutting a straight edge along the ragged 
sides of the irregular piece of iron, and 
when I discovered him he had outlined 
the width of his knife on the plate and 
was cutting away at it. It would proba- 
bly have taken him two years to cut out 
this piece, and two more to fashion the 
knife into shape and usefulness. 

The file which he had made into a 
cold-chisel was such a proof of labor and 
patience that it was a great curiosity to 
me, and I gave him a butcher's knife in 
exchange for it. Thus almost the very 
thing he had been so long trying to 



134 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

make he now unexpectedly found in his 
possession. When I told him that our 
factories (or " big igloos,'' as I called 
them for his easier understanding) could 
make more than he could carry of such 
butcher-knives during the time we had 
spent in talking about his, he expressed 
his great surprise in prolonged gasps of 
breath at this manifest superiority of 
the Kod-loo2i-sah, as the Eskimo call the 
white men. 

Among the women of this same tribe 
I found a number of square iron nee- 
dles that they had taken months to 
make, slowly filing them on rough, rusty 
iron plates and occasionally using stones 
for the same purpose. We had with us 
a great number of glover's needles, and 
these we traded for the iron ones, which 
to us were great curiosities. The women 



ESKIMO PATIENCE, 135 

do some wonderfully neat sewing with 
these needles, considering the nature of 
the implements and the coarse thread of 
reindeer sinew which they use. This 
sinew is stripped from the reindeer's 
back in flat pieces about eighteen inches 
long and two inches wide. The Eskimo 
woman's spool of thread consists of a 
bundle of these strips of sinew, hung up 
in the igloo, from which she strips a 
thread whenever she needs one. It is 
very strong, and will cut through the 
flesh of one's fingers before it can be 
broken. The Eskimo braid it into fish- 
lines, bow-strings, whip-cord, and nearly 
always have a ball of it on hand in the 
house braided up and ready for use. 

Before the Eskimo became acquainted 
with white men, and learned to use their 
better implements, many household arti- 



136 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

cles were made from bone and the ivory 
walrus tusks. Among these were torks, 
spoons, and even knives, of which a few 
designs are shown on the next page. 
Very few are in existence now, but some 
of them were much more ornamental 
than those in the illustration, for, as I 
have said, the northern natives do not 
hesitate to begin any thing for want of 
time in which to complete it; and if they 
only have the ingenuity to manufacture 
odd or pretty designs, they have plenty 
of leisure and plenty of patience to carve 
them out. 

Many of the smaller and odd pieces 
left from the tusk are carved into figures 
of birds and animals. Occasionally you 
will see some old woman of the tribe 
with quite a bagful of ivory dogs, ducks, 
bears, swans, walrus, seals, and every 



ESKIMO PATIENCE. 130 

living thing with the form of which they 
are familiar. They will make rude 
dominoes and sit and play with them for 
hours at a time during their long winter 
evenings. And not toys only, but many 
articles of utility also are thus carved 
from the ivory taken from the tusks of 
the walrus. Walrus and seal spear- 
heads, and the sharpened head of the 
lances they used in killling the musk-ox 
and polar bear, were formerly thus made. 
In fact, it would have been almost impos- 
sible for the Eskimo to exist without this 
valuable portion of the walrus, before 
an acquaintance with the white men en- 
abled them to secure iron and guns to 
replace their own rude implements. 
The principal use now made of the 
tusks is to trade them in quantities 
to the whalers, who pay for them 



140 



THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 



In such merchandise as the natives 
need. 

The Eskimo have no money of any 
sort, and know nothing of its use. In 
fact, they know very Httle about the 
true value of any one thing as compared 
with others ; and if they desire a needle, 
or any other small article, they are ready 
to orive in exchang-e for it a grarment or 
object which you, brought up to compare 
the value of things, would know to be 
worth ten, or possibly one hundred, times 
as much. The ooor creatures are thus 
often badly cheated by unprincipled per- 
sons who take advantag^e of this trait of 
their character, and they frequently re- 
ceive little or nothinor for things which 
in our own country are very valuable. 
I once saw such a man give twenty-five 
musket-caps to an Eskimo boy for five 



ESKIMO PATIENCE. 141 

pretty, white fox skins, which, at that 
rate, would have been one cent of our 
money for three fox skins ; and the skins 
could readily be sold for five dollars 
when he reached the United States. 



CHAPTER X. 

LITTLE BOREAS'S WORK. 

TN common with the children of work= 
-*• ers all over the world, little Boreas 
must commence to take his share in the 
family toil as soon as he is old enough 
to learn and strong enough to do. Most 
of the sports of the boys are, in fact, 
such as will enable them to learn some- 
thing that will be useful later in life, such 
as playing with the young dogs, harness- 
inp- and drivino- them, shootincr with the 
bow, and arrow, and throwing the lance 



LITTLE BOREAS' S WORK. 143 

at live animals. The girls, also, in 
making their dolls, learn to sew and to 
make coats and other garments of rein- 
deer skin, and boots and shoes of seal- 
skin leather. 

When the men have very nearly 
finished building the igloo, the boys are 
expected to take the big, broad wooden 
shovel, described in Chapter II., and 
throw the loose snow against the sides 

of the igloo ; for between the blocks of 
snow will be many "chinks" and crevices 
that would let in a great deal of cold air 
if not stopped up. Besides throwing on 
this loose, soft snow about two feet deep, 
the boys have still another way of " chink- 
ing." Little Boreas, with the snow-knife 
in his right hand, cuts from the upper 
edge of the block, in the joint which is 
to be " chinked," a thin slice of snow. 



144 ^^^ CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

and with his left fist doubled up rams it 
into the joint between the blocks, his 
left fist keeping a constant punching as 
the knife runs slowly along the edge of 
the joint. 

Of course, durincr the first three or 
four courses of blocks, the boys (and 
sometimes the girls) can "chink" the 
joints while they are standing or kneel- 
ing on the ground ; but after it gets 
above and beyond the reach of their 
arms, they have to crawl on top of the 
house, which looks so frail that you are 
almost certain the little fellows will 
tumble through the thin snow walls of 
the hut. But when it is completed and 
made of gfood snow, three or four biof 
men can go on top of it, so much 
stronger is it than it appears to be. 
Sometimes, however, the boys are sur- 



LITTLE BOREAS' S WORK. 145 

prised and disappointed ; for, when the 
snow is soft, or happens to be full of 
sand or little specks of ice, they come 
tumbling through the top of the z'gioo, 
generally on the heads of those who are 
making the bed or setting the lamp 
inside of the house ; and then the igioo 
has to be built all over again. Fortu- 
nately, however, these cases are of rare 
occurrence. 

Sometimes, in very cold weather, the 
boys will both " chink" and "bank" the 
igloo (banking being the covering w^ith 
loose snow), and then, with a small lamp, 
it is quite easy to heat up the little snow 
house to a comfortable temperature ; 
but this, you remember, must never rise 
to the point where snow melts, or the 
house will come tumbling in on their 
heads. After Boreas's father has cut 



J46 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

enough snow blocks to go two or three 
times around the igloo, if there is no 
other man in the party, he will tell 
Boreas to cut the rest ; and the lad gen. 
erally manages to furnish his father with 
enough blocks to complete the house. 

After the igloo is finished, the bedding 
of reindeer skins is taken from the 
sledge ; but before these go in-doors, the 
snow that has worked into them (espe- 
cially if there has been a strong wind 
during the day) must be beaten off with a 
snow-stick ; and this comparatively light 
work generally falls to the children, unless 
there is a great hurry to get Into shelter 
from some terrible wind, in which case 
all the party turn to and work with a will. 

When the house is finished, Boreas 
must see that the dogs are unharnessed 
and turned loose. The seal-skin harness, 



LITTLE BOREAS S WORK'. 147 

which the dogs would eat if in their 
usual hungry condition, must be put 
inside the snow house or fastened to the 
top of a tall pole, stuck upright in the 
snow, so that the dogs can not reach it. 
In the morning, when the dogs are 
needed for the day's work, the boys have 
to scamper around with two or three 
harnesses in their hands, catch and har- 
ness the dogs, hitch them to the sledge, 
and then start out after another lot. It 
frequently happens that some particular 
dog takes an especial delight in giving his 
catchers just as much trouble as he possi- 
bly can. As soon as he sees that the 
other clogs are being harnessed, he will 
trot away to the top of some high ridge, 
and coolly sitting down, will maliciously 
watch the efforts made to catch him. 
Of course, every body now turns out. 



148 THE CHILD REM OF THE COLD. 

the dog is surrounded, and probably after 
he has broken through the circle thus 
formed around him two or three times, he 
is finally caught and receives a severe 
trouncinof from a harness-trace in the 
hands of some angry young Eskimo ; 
but this lesson seldom does the dogs 
much good, as I have always noticed 
that, like spoiled children, they invaria- 
bly go from bad to worse, until finally 
their master becomes so angry that he 
ties one of the dog's forefeet to its body 
every night, so that he will have no 
trouble in catchino- the would-be runa- 
way on the next morning. 

The dogs are also used in various ways 
in hunting. When the weather is so 
foggy that Boreas's father can not see 
very far, and there is consequently but 
little prospect of killing any thing, unless 




mm 



'^/Wi^fl. .:f4 



LITTLE BOREAS' S WORK. 



151 



the hunter almost stumbles upon it, the 
father will take his bow and arrows, or 
his gun, if he be fortunate enough to own 
one, and giving the best-trained hunting- 
dog in charge of Boreas himself, they 
start out reindeer hunting. Boreas puts 
a harness on the dog, ties the trace 
around his own waist, or holds it in his 
hands, and follows his father out into 
the fog. 

Of course, the older Eskimo has some 
idea of where the reindeer will be grazing 
or resting, and he soon finds out which 
way the wind is blowing over the place 
where he suspects the reindeer to be. 
Then, with Boreas and the dog, he goes 
around in such a way that the game will 
not be disturbed, to some place where 
the wind, blowing over the reindeer, will 
come toward the hunters. As soon as 



152 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

this place is reached, the dog smells the 
reindeer, and commences sniffing- the air 
as if anxious to o-et toward them. Boreas 
allows the dog to advance slowly, still 
holding on to the harness so that the 
dog shall not run away. As soon as it 
scents the deer, it goes directly toward 
them, and when it is quite near, it grows 
excited, and commences to jump and to 
jerk the harness-trace by which Boreas is 
holdino- it ; being- a well-trained huntino- 
dog, however, it never barks so as to 
frighten the deer by the sound. 

Boreas s father now knows from these 
excited actions of the dog that the rein- 
deer must be close at hand, although he 
can not see them for the fog. So he tells 
Boreas to hold the dog and remain in 
that spot, while he takes his bow or gun 
and crawls cautiously forward in the 



LITTLE BOREAS S WORK. 153 

proper direction. Before he has gone 
far, probably not more than twenty or 
twenty-five yards away, the huge forms 
of two or three reindeer loom up through 
the fog. If he is a pood hunter he will 
at least bring one down, and perhaps 
two or three of them, and so have some- 
thing for supper. When there is snow 
on the ground, the boy will generally 
take two or three does alone, and after 
a reindeer is killed, will use them to 
drae it into the snow house. As Boreas 
loves excitement, this is good sport, and 
in this way he soon learns to hunt quite 
well. 



CHAPTER XL 

SEAL HUNTING. 

'T^HE ice on the ocean forms from six 
-*• to ten feet thick, and through this 
deep ice the seals manage to scratch a hole 
to the top, and then form a little igloo 
in the foot or two of snow that usually 
covers the ice. In the top of this little 
snow dome is an opening as large as 
your two fingers ; and to this igloo the 
seal comes, about every quarter of an 
hour, to breathe. When he puts his 
nose close to the little hole at the top 



SEAL HUNTING. 



155 




of the dome for some fresh air, he 
breathes in a series of short gasps that 
any one near the 



hole can readily 
hear. These holes 
are so small that 

even the close- 

observing Es- ike s.als igloo. 

kimo, hunters, while walkln2f over miles 
of ice-fields, could easily pass them 
by without observing them. But if 
there is a dog along, as in reindeer- 
hunting, and if the wind is in the 
right direction, and a seal has been 
breathing recently in the igloo, the dog 
will scent a seal-hole a hundred yards 
away, and will lead the hunter to it. As 
it is very uncertain just haw long he will 
have to wait for the seals, the hunter 
proceeds at once to cut out two or three 



I5& 



THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 



blocks of snow to make a comfortable 
seat on which to rest and wait. As 1 
have already said, the seal breathes, or 
" blows," as it is called, every fifteen or 
twenty minutes; but oftentimes he is 

traveling, and 
^ each t i m e 

^^^^^^ 

0\ a different 




hole to blow. 
/ It is possi- 
/ - ble, too, that 
READY FOR THE SEAL TO BLOW. He may hear 
or smell the hunter or his dog — for 
seals are very timid animals — in fact, 
there are many reasons why the hole 
may not be visited by a seal for a 
long time, and after watching for a 
whole day, the hunter may have to 
leave the place unrewarded. Where 



SEAL HUNTING. 157 

the natives, as is often the case, have 
been almost starving, owing to the scarc- 
ity of seals and other game on which 
they live, the best and most patient seal- 
hunters have been known to sit for two 
or three days at one hole watching vigi- 
lantly for a seal's nose. But, however 
long it may be before "pussy" (as the 
seals are sometimes called) comes around 
to breathe a little whiff of fresh air, as 
soon as the first "blow" is heard by the 
hunter, who is, perhaps, half asleep, he 
is at once full of expectation and excite- 
ment. He places the point of his seal- 
spear close to the "blow-hole," and by 
the time " pussy " has taken two or three 
whiffs she is astonished by a sudden 
thrust of the spear crushing through the 
dome of snow ; the cruel barb on the 
spear-point catches into her flesh under- 



158 



THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 



neath the skin, and the hunter draws her 
to the top of the ice, crushes in the snow 
with his heavy heel, and then kills the 
captured seal. 

Sometimes the mother seal seeks a 
breathing-hole under the deepest snow 
and makes a much larger dome, so 
that the ice will form a shelf two or 
three feet in 
width. Here the 
little " kittens," 
or baby seals, 
spend their time 
until they are 
big enough to try to swim with their 
mother and learn to care for them- 
selves. Here, too, she brings them 
food, and when disturbed, hurries away, 
leaving her kittens on their ice shelf, 
where they are safe from harm, be- 




THE LEDGES FOR THE SEAL BABIES. 



SEAL HUNTING. 159 

cause they are of the same color as 
the snow and, therefore, can not be seen 
by the wolf or bear who is out seal-hunt- 
ing-. The Eskimo, however, when he 
comes to one of these igloos, has an 
instrument like a long knitting needle, 
which he sticks in through the blow-hole, 
and, working it around, soon finds out 
whether any babies are to be kidnapped 
from Mother Seal's sn<Dw house 



CHAPTER XII. 

FISHING. 

X FTER little Boreas's father has gone 
"^ *- into camp, and while he is building 
his snow house, the boys of the party go 
to work, dior a hole through the ice on the 
fresh-water lake, near where the camp is 
built, in order to get fresh water, with 
which to cook supper. The first thing 
necessary is to select a good spot for the 
well, which is generally about a foot and 
a half or two feet in diameter, and from 
four to eight and ten feet deep, depend- 
ing, of course, upon the thickness of the 
ice. 



FISHING. i6i 

But, before they begin to dig, the boys 
fling themselves down on the ice, even 
flattening their noses hard against it, so 
as to bring their eyes as close to it as 
possible. From some peculiarity in the 
color and appearance of the ice they can 
judge as to there being water underneath 
it, for there is nothing more disappoint- 
inof, after havino- dugf the well five or six 
feet down, to find lumps of it coming up 
full of mud or sand, showinof that the 
bottom is dry. The boys, however, sel- 
dom make a mistake in their observa- 
tions, although now and then they will 
get "fooled" about it, and will find that 
they have spent a quarter of an hour's 
hard work for nothing. 

The deeper the snow has drifted on 
the ice the thinner the ice will be, as the 
snow protects it during the intense cold, 



102 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

just as in our climate the deep saow 
protects the delicate plants on the 
ground, and keeps them from being 
killed by the coldest weather. And as 
it is so much easier to shovel off the 
soft snow than to dior throug-h the hard 
ice, the boys always look for a deep 
snow-drift very near to the spot where 
they have peered through "the ice and 
seen clear water beneath. If they can 
get near a crack that extends entirely 
through the ice, it will also make it much 
easier to die the well, as one side is thus 
already prepared for them. 

Having selected as favorable a place 
as possible, they commence their dig- 
ging. The first instrument used is noth- 
ing more than a chisel, a bayonet, or a 
sharpened piece of iron, lashed on the 
end of a pole, ten or twelve feet long. 




WAITING FOR THE RETURN OF THE SEAL 



FISHIA'G. 163 

With this they cut a circular hole in the 
ice of about two feet in diameter, and a 
foot deep. Then, when it becomes difTh- 
cult to use the ice-chisel, they scoop out 
the accumulated pulverized ice with thin 
ladles made from musk-ox horn, of which 
I told you in a former chapter. One of 
these ladles is also lashed to a long pole, 
and is used to dip the cut ice out of the 
well. And so the boys work away at 
their well, first cutting down a foot or so 
with their ice-chisels, and then scooping 
it out with their ladles, then cutting 
again, then scooping, until finally they 
have bored clear through, and the fresh 
water comes rushing up to the top, and 
all the thirsty people in camp, who 
have had no water all day — as well 
as the dogs, which are equally thirsty 
— get a good drink, and have plenty 



164 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

of water with which to prepare sup- 
per. 

If the boys had not been successful in 
finding water, the girls would be obliged 
to collect a lot of ice or snow and melt 
it in stone kettles over the igloo lamps, 
and at least an hour would be wasted 
before their hot supper would be ready — 
and that is quite a serious affair, as in 
that terribly cold country people want 
their supper just as soon as it can be 
made. Besides this, a great deal of oil 
would have to be used in meltingr the ice 
and snow, and oil is very precious. 

In digging the ice-well the boys are 
careful to keep the hole the same diame- 
ter away down to the water, especially 
when they come near the bottom, for if 
there are any fish in the lake or river 
they will try to catch them through this 



FISHING. 165 

hole in the ice. Most of the lakes and 
rivers of the Arctic regions of North 
America are full of delicious salmon, and 
the poor Eskimo who have to eat so 
much fishy seal meat and strong-tasting 
walrus flesh, appreciate these fine salmon 
much more than do we, with our great 
variety of food. Their fish-lines are 
made of reindeer sinew, and are much 
stronger than are our lines. The fish- 
hooks are simply bent pieces of sharp- 
ened iron or copper, and as they are not 
barbed at the end, the native fisherman 
has to pull in very fast when he hooks 
his fish, or he will lose it, as every boy 
knows who has fished with a pin-hook. 

If a lake is well stocked with fish, the 
natives will often camp by it for two or 
three days and dig a number of holes, so 
that the women, and every boy and girl 



1 66 THE CHILDREN OE THE COLD. 

as well, can be busy catching salmon 
while the hunters are roamino- over the 
hills lookinor for reindeer and musk-oxen. 
Here they will sit, on a couple of snovv^- 
blocks, nearly all day long, holding the 
hook a couple of feet below the ice, and 
bobbing it continually to attract the no- 
tice of the fish. Sometimes they attach 
small, polished ivory balls near the hook, 
to attract the fish, which seeing them, 
from a long distance, dancing up and 
down and glistening in the light, at once 
swim up and try to eat the reindeer bait 
on the bent hook, to their certain and 
speedy disgust. As a protection from 
the wind, the young fishers often build a 
sort of half igloo, and shelter themselves 
behind it. This also serves as a place to 
hide the fish that are caught ; for there 
are always a crowd of half-starved dogs 



FISHING. 169 

sneaking about, trying by hook or crook 
to steal a fish. 

But this is not the only way that the 
Eskimo boys and girls have of catching 
fish. In the spring of their year, about 
the middle of our summer time, when 
the ice is breaking up and running out 
of their rivers, they catch fish in great 
quantities at the rapids in the rivers, 
and store them away for use in the 
winter. For th's purpose they use a 
curious spiked and barbed fish-spear, 
which is shown in the illustration on 
page 167. 

When the fish are very numerous, the 
men and women, as well as the boys and 
girls, manage to get a footing on some 
rock in the rapids, where they can stand 
easily, and, as the fish rush by, they im- 
pale them on these spears until great 



lyo THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

quantities have been caught. The fish 
are then spht open, and spread over 
double rows of strinos stretched from 
rock to rock. Here they are left to dry, 
though in the cold, short Arctic summer 
the fish only become about half as well 
dried, as they would in our climate. 
These dried fish are then stored in seal- 
skin bags and kept for future use; a 
great many are fed to the dogs to put 
tliem in good condition for the winter. 



CHAPTER XIIL 

HOW THEIR CLOTHES ARE MADE. 

TT7HEN the reindeer have been killed, 
' ' their skins are stretched on the 
ground to dry, with the hairy side down, 
and although they may freeze as stiff as a 
board, in the course of a week or two the 
water will dry out of them. These skins 
are then taken and put through a pro- 
cess by means of which they are made as 
nice and soft as a piece of buckskin or 
chamois-skin — or, if it be a fawn rein- 
deer, as soft as piece of kid. This is 



172 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

done by scraping them with a pecuharly 
shaped instrument which tears off all the 
flesh that may have adhered, and scrapes 
away the inner thick skin that makes the 
hide so stiff and unpliable. When the 
skins are thick and heavy, the men do 
the work, for it is then very difficult ; but 
otherwise the women, and very often the 
little girls, scrape the skins and give the 
finishing touches, and then make them 
up into coats, dresses, stockings, slippers, 
and all sorts of clothing. 

For'' cutting these reindeer skins into 
shapes for garments, a very queer kind 
of scissors is used. It is, in fact, a kind 
of knife, and an odd knife at that. It 
looks very much like the knife that is 
used by saddlers and harness-makers ; 
and when it is used in cutting, it is always 
shoved away from the person using it. 



HO IV THEIR CLOTHES ARE MADE. 173 

This knife is used for every thing that is 

to be done in the way of cutting, from 

seal and reindeer skin to the thinnest 

and most fragile strings. At meals, too, 

some one will put to his mouth a great 

piece of blubber or fish as big as your 

fist, seize as much as he can with his 

teeth, grasp the rest in his hand, and cut 

off a huofe mouthful with this knife. If 

you were watching him, you would feel 

certain that he would slice off his nose in 

this awkward movement, but the Eskimo 

are so very dextrous that there is not 

the sli2:htest dang-er of such an accident. 

When the reindeer skins have been 

dressed, and made up into garments, and 

these have been put on — girls and boys, 

men and women, are dressed so nearly 

alike that at any considerable distance 

you can not tell them apart. 



174 



THE CHILDREN OF 7HE COLD. 



The Eskimo girl wears a long apron. 
And just over her shoulders her coat- 
sleeves swell out into large pockets ; and 
in her stockings, just above the outer 
part of the ankles, she also has pockets, 
in which she keeps her sewing, moss for 
lamp-wicking, a roll of sinew for thread, 
and any other similar article that she 
may need to carry with her. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

FOUR ESKIMO CHILDREN. 

'T"'HE four Eskimo children with whom 
-^ I became best acquainted during 
my Arctic trip were in my sledge-party 
in a journey from North Hudson's Bay 
to King William's Land and back again, 
which occupied nearly a year. Their 
names were Ah-wan-ak, Koo-man-ah, 
I-yawk-a-wak, and Kood-le-uk. 

Ahwanak was a boy of about fourteen 
or fifteen, Koomanah a boy of from 
twelve to thirteen, lyawkawak was my 



176 THE CHILDREN OF 7' HE COLD. 

driver's little two-year-old baby boy, and 
Koodleuk was a bright little three-year- 
old girl. Ahwanak and Koomanah, of 
course, were good-sized boys, and able 
to do considerable work for us, on even 
so hard a trip as was ours. These boys 
walked nearly che entire distance, but 
the babies lyawkawak and Koodleuk, 
when they were not in their mothers' 
hoods, always rode on the sledges that 
their fathers managed. Their place upon 
the sledges was near the front of the 
loads, close to their fathers, who, as dog- 
drivers, managed their sledges from this 
place, and could thus easily watch their 
little children, and see that they did not 
tumble off when riding over rough or 
steep places. 

In lashing on the loads, a nice sort of 
a place would be fixed, where the two 



FOUR ESKIMO CHILDREN. 179 

babies could cuddle in and rest as com- 
fortably as if they were in a baby-car- 
riage. Here they would ride nearly the 
whole day, excepting at such time as 
their mothers would take them into their 
hoods ; and despite the bumpings of the 
sledge or the raw cold weather, they 
would be pleasant and jolly enough to 
make a civilized baby ashamed of itself. 
Sometimes, however, the babies would 
cry with the cold, and have to be put 
in their mothers' warm hoods to keep 
them from freezing; but the amount of 
cold they would stand without complain- 
ing was really remarkable. And, not- 
withstanding the bitter exposure they 
undergo, such a thing as a "cold" is 
almost unknown among Eskimo chil- 
dren. 

Every hour or two, according as the 



l8o THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

pulling was hard or the load heavy, the 
sledge would stop for ten or fifteen 
minutes to give the dogs and every one 
else a oood rest. The two babies would 
then be taken from the sledge, and 
allowed to run about and exercise until 
the sledgre would start asfain. 

However much they might tumble over 
the hard snow, there was but little dan- 
ger of their hurting themselves, so heav- 
ily were they clothed in their dresses of 
reindeer skin, looking for all the world, 
like great big balls of fur running about. 
After the party had gone into camp, the 
little babies played about among the 
sleeping dogs or whatever attracted their 
attention, until the reindeer bedding was 
arranged inside the io-loo, when the little 
people were undressed and put to bed. 

After the lamp has been burning until 



FOUR ESKIMO CHILDREN. i8i 

the small snow house is about as warm as 
is advisable, the babies crawl out arid 
play about on the bed. lyawkawak 
and Koodleuk had such unpronounceable 
names that they were hard to remember ; 
and so the men of our party called the 
boy " Jack," and the girl " Rosy," on 
account of her rosy red cheeks. Most 
of the Eskimo children have red cheeks, 
despite the dark hue of their faces, and 
though they are rarely free from dirt. 
Yet, the children's faces are generally 
neater than those of the "grown-up" 
people, many of whom look really hor- 
rible, as they never wash their faces. 

The wives of Toolooah and Ikquiesek 
both were very particular with their chil- 
dren, and little "Jack" and "Rosy" 
were as neat Eskimo children as you 
could possibly find. 



1 82 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

The two boys, Ahwanak and Koo- 
manah, had a great deal of work to do 
about the camp, much of which has 
already been described in former chapters. 
They had been through some curious 
adventures even before I met them. 

At one time, when he was about ten 
years old, Koomanah was walking, with 
his little sister and brother, on the salt- 
water ice that forms for two or three 
miles wide alongr the shores of Hudson's 
Bay, when they were greatly terrified to 
find that the grreat field of ice on which 
they were walking had separated from 
the firm shore-ice, and was drifting out 
to sea. A great lane of water which 
lay between them and their homes was 
every minute growing wider; and worse 
than all, a storm was coming up, which 
would make it still harder to escape. 



FOUR ESKIMO CHILDREN. 183 

Before long, their situation became 
known, and many a brave man started 
out in the rough waters in his little frail 
seal-skin canoe, or kiaky to do his best 
to rescue the children. In a little while, 
Koomanah saw their rescuers ; but the 
storm had made the waves so heavy that 
the edoes of the ice-field were broken 
into a thousand floating cakes, many 
of them as big as small houses, which 
turned and tumbled over one another 
in a way to appall even the stoutest 
heart. But brave young Koomanah was 
equal to the emergency, and, fearful as 
it seemed, he knew he must cross that 
wide space of rolling, heaving, tumbling 
blocks of ice before he could reach the 
skin canoes of the rescuers, who, of 
course, picked out the best place possible 
to accomplish their daring attempts. 



184 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

At last, Koomanah found a suitable 
place, and taking advantage of an ap- 
parent lull in the storm, without hesita- 
tion he started across the pack with his 
brother's and sister's hands in his ; and 
knowing that their lives depended on 
his judgment, he carefully picked his 
way from block to block. A dozen 
times, either he or the children slipped 
on the danciuQ^ ice, and once a o-reat 
block near them rolled completel}' over, 
deluging them with water and blinding 
Koomanah with the spray. Recovering 
himself, he still splashed and struggled 
on like a little hero. At last one block, 
on which they stopped a moment, tilted 
on its side, and threw them in a heap. 
Here one of the little children was 
crushed between two great grinding 
cakes of ice, and sunk out of sight in 



FOUR ESKIMO CHILDREN. 185 

the tossing, foaming- water. Koomanah 
grasped the other child in his arms, and, 
staggering and plunging over the ice, 
the tossing and turning of which grew 
worse as he neared its outer edge, he 
managed to throw the baby he had saved 
close to a kiak, and then threw himself 
after it. Both were picked up and were 
soon safe in their home, which, though 
made desolate by the loss of one little 
one, had still two left, one of whom 
would be acknowledged as a little hero 
the world over. 

Ahwanak's adventure was even more 
exciting, though he had no little children 
in his charge. 

He had gone with his big brother 
Iquiesek and with Nannook, a splendid 
hunter of the village, on a walrus hunt. 
The three were caught on an ice-floe, or 



1 86 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

solid field of ice, which suddenly separ- 
ated, and the piece on which the)' stood 
was blown straight out to sea. It sailed 
on until, in the drifting" storm, nothing 
was seen but the waters of the bay that 
surrounded them, and all hope of seeing 
land until the gale subsided was given up. 
Besides the two men and Ahwanak, 
there were a sledore and four or five doofs 
on the ice-raft. Takino- thinp;s rather 
coolly, after they had recovered from 
their surprise and disappointment, they 
went to work and built a good strong 
igloo to protect them from the storm. 
Presently a walrus crawled up to ride on 
their ship of Ice ; they killed it, and, 
dragging its carcass up to their snow 
house, made a lamp out of the thick 
hide, prepared some lamp-wicking from 
pieces of cloth, cut a quantity of blubber 



FOUR ESKIMO CHILD REM. xS; 

from the walrus, and in a little while had 
their igloo about as warm as one regu- 
larly constructed on the land, and had, 
at the same time, plenty of meat for 
themselves and their few dogs. If they 
had only been provided with bedding, 
they could have safely remained on the 
island of ice all winter, so far as any fear 
of starvation was concerned. As It was, 
they drew their arms out of their coat 
sleeves, and went to sleep in their clothes, 
as do all Eskimo when without bedding. 
for two days the storm raged. They 
seldom ventured out, and could not tell 
which way they were drifting. On the 
third day. however, the storm cleared up, 
the long sledge was placed against the 
snow house, and from its topmost slat 
Ahwanak scanned the horizon for some 
sign of land, or something by which they 



l88 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

might tell where they were. In the 
course of the day the prisoners on the 
ice-raft sighted on the horizon the bold 
headland of Poillon Point, and by night- 
time the' tide and current had set them 
ia so close to the land that they were 
able to reach the firm ice along-shore, 
where they soon hitched up their dogs 
and rode home as fast as they could over 
twenty miles that intervened — greatly 
astonishing and delighting their anxious 
friends. These driftings out to sea on 
great cakes of Ice, however, are rather 
common adventures, and nearly every 
hunter has had one or two such experi- 
ences in his life-time. 

But to return to Ahwanak and Koo- 
manah. When we left our morning's 
camp for our day's journey, the two boys 
would walk along, with but little to do ; 



FOUR ESKIMO CHILDREN. 



191 



but if reindeer were seen grazing on the 
distant hills, Ahwanak and Koomanah 
would take charge of two of the sledges, 
while the men seized their o^uns and tried 
to kill some of the deer. If the reindeer 
were directly in our path, the dogs and 
sledges halted, and the two boys had 
only to stand guard ; but if they were off 
our track, then the sledges kept on their 
way, some man taking the foremost 
sledge, and the boys easily driving the 
dogs, which very willingly follow a 
sledge-track in front of them. In case 
the party halted, the boys would watch 
the hunters from the top of a loaded 
sledge, and if they saw one come to the 
top of a ridge or on a hill, and with one 
arm extended, swing his body from a 
perpendicular nearly to the ground, they 
knew a reindeer had been killed, and that 



192 



THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 



two or three dogs were needed to drag 
off the body. Then they would unhitch 
these from the team, and take them over 
to the hunter, who would fasten their 
traces around the reindeer's horns, and 
drag it to the sledge. Occasionally the 
two boys would try a reindeer hunt on 
their own hook, and although they were 
seldom successful, not daring to frighten 
the deer from the men who were better 
hunters, yet once in awhile they were 
rewarded, and then their eyes would 
fairly glisten with joy and pride. 

Colonel Gilder, of our party, was very 
kind to little Koomanah, and becoming 
tired of carrying his revolver, he took off 
the ordinary wooden pistol-butt and put 
in a longer one, more like a gun- 
stock, and roughly made of walnut. He 
let Koomanah use this dwarf gun, as 



FOUR ESKIMO CHILDREN. 193 

the boy could easily fire it from his 
shoulder. This, of course, increased its 
accuracy of aim, as it could be held much 
steadier. It held six cartridges, and 
could, therefore, be fired six times with- 
out reloading. As so wonderful a gun 
in so young a person's possession was 
never before known among these simple 
people, Koomanah was greatly elevated 
in their estimation, and felt very proud 
and elated over his fine weapon. 

As I have said, the two boys seldom 
interfered with the hunting of the men, 
and when they took their guns (for Ah- 
wanak had a musket that he greatly 
prized) and went away from the sledges, 
it was nearly always to get far to the 
right or left and hide behind some ridge. 
Here they would wait to see if the rein- 
deer ran in that direction after the men 



194 



THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 



had fired at them, in which case they 
might get a running shot as they passed. 
The farther north we penetrated, the 
more stupid were the reindeer ; and hav- 
ing never before heard a shot fired, they 
would run about in a frightened and 
aimless way, thus giving the boys a much 
better chance at them. 

One day, while going through a nar- 
row valley between steep hills, reindeer 
were reported ahead. The sledges were 
stopped, and the hunters w^ith their guns 
went on to try to kill some ; Koomanah 
and Ahwanak folloMdng slowly behind 
with their guns to see if they could pos- 
sibly get a shot. Seeing a small break 
or pass in the steep hills to their left, the 
boys entered it to go into the next val- 
ley, hoping the deer might cross their 
path. They were nearly through, when 



FOi'R ESKIMO children: ig^ 

they heard shots, and. keeping a short 
distance apart, they concealed them- 
selves as well as they could by lying 
behind some stones, and awaited results. 

The reindeer, frightened by the rapid 
shooting, broke in a circle around the 
hunters, and were rushino- down the val- 
ley, when they saw the dogs and sledges. 
Quick as a flash, they turned up the pass 
the boys had entered. When the deer 
came trotting along, and were with- 
in about a hundred yards of Kooma- 
nah, they turned suddenly around and 
stopped, and, with eyes dilating and ears 
pricked up, they looked backward 
through the pass, watching for danger, 
but never dreaming of that directly 
ahead of them in the shape of two 
small boys. 

This stoppage gave Koomanah a 



196 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

splendid shot, but a long one ; and with 
his heart in his mouth for fear of miss- 
ing, he took a broadside aim at a big 
buck, over the stone behind which he 
was hidden. "Bang!" went Kooma- 
nah's pistol-gun, and away went the deer 
like arrows. But they had not gone a 
score of yards before the big buck com- 
menced to stumble, and in a little while 
rolled over on its side and commenced 
kicking in the air. Koomanah's shot 
had been much better than he thought 
when he saw them all start away 
together. Of course Koomanah had a 
right to be proud now over this big rein- 
deer, that would have taken a half a 
dozen boys of his size to pack into camp, 
and he was highly praised for his sports- 
manship. N 

During the whole trip Koomanah 



FOUR ESKIMO CHILDREN igp 

killed ten reindeer and Ahwanak six. 
There were two shot-guns with the 
party, and as none of the hunters 
seemed to monopolize the smaller game 
as they did the reindeer and seal, the two 
boys had great sport with the small 
game, and we were constantly regaled 
with the ducks, geese and ptarmigan that 
they brought in. 

One of the special duties of the boys 
was to look after duck-eggs when in 
season. At this they were very suc- 
cessful, for durinor the summer the eider- 
ducks swarm in countless numbers to the 
island of King William's Land, where 
they hatch and rear their young dis- 
turbed by but few of their enemies — the 
wolves, wolverines, and foxes. Many a 
nice dish of eggs did we have through 
the vigilance and energy of Koomanah 



200 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

and Ahwanak. As we were then living 
on nothing but seal and reindeer meat, 
these eggs were considered a great luxury. 
After the small ducks had grown large 
enough to be eatable, the two boys killed 
a great number — Ahwanak securing over 
fifty in one day. The Eskimo boys are 
excellent stone-throwers. It is no un- 
common thing for them to kill a ptar- 
migan or a duck in this manner, as well 
as the little ground-squirrel (or marmot), 
common in that country, and bring it in 
to be eaten. As is the case with most 
savages, the Eskimo children have few 
pets, as they have no way to take care of 
them. 

Thus far, all that I have said has, I am 
glad to say, been wholly in favor of our 
two boys ; but they had one bad habit 
for folk so young; although it is a habit 



FOUR ESKIMO CHILDREN. 201 

which is common among the young Es- 
kimo. This is smoking. As soon as 
they can learn to draw a pipe, they be- 
gin ; and both men and women smoke, 
although the boys and women generally 
smoke a weed that grows in the Arctic 
country, and is not nearly so strong nor 
disagreeable as tobacco. 

After Koomanah and Ahwanak re- 
turned to the northern part of Hudson's 
Bay at the close of our year's sledge-trip, 
they were given the guns they had so 
well earned, and ammunition for them 
also. 



CHAPTER XV. 

HOW WE PASSED THE WINTER. 

TT7E have spoken of all the games and 
* ^ sports, the troubles and labors of 
the little ones of far-away Eskimo land, 
and even chronicled some of the doings 
of the small boys who had had interest- 
ing adventures of their own, and now, 
I suppose, you might like to hear how 
we white men lived in the Arctic regions, 
when with all these Eskimo people and 
their children, and, especially, how we 
passed the winter with them. 



BO IV WE PASSED THE WINTER. 203 

I have already told you how they 
built their curious little houses of snow 
for winter dwellings, and how much they 
looked like the half of a huge egg-shell 
resting on the side of a hill covered with 
sncw„ Now, in order to make these 
houses of snow — igloos, as the makers 
call them — the snow must be of a certain 
hardness and texture, so that the blocks 
— or huge snow-bricks, if you would yo 
call them — will hold together when hand- 
ling them, and after they are in the walls 
of the white building. It must h^ve 
been quite cold so as to freeze the sr.ow 
into a sort of homogeneous mass, and 
it must have been packed down by the 
wind a good deal to make it com pact 
and solid. The first snow of the corninor 
winter does not make good strong snow- 
blocks for the igloos, however deep it 



204 



THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 



may fall, and from the time there is 
enough of it, the Eskimo often have to 
wait three or four weeks before it is lit 
for buildinof. As it eets too cold in their 
summer seal-skin tents before this time 
comes, the natives generally build pre- 
liminary houses of ice, which, singular 
as it may seem, are much warmer than 
the tents, but not as comfortable as the 
houses of snow. When the ice has 
formed to about six inches in thickness 
on some lake close by, they cut out their 
big slabs of ice for the sides of the 
house. Imagine an ordinary-sized house- 
door to be a slab of ice about six inches 
thick ; then take a half-dozen to a dozen 
of these doors, and place them in a cir- 
cle, joining them edge to edge, but lean 
ing in slightly, and you will have formed 
your curious house of ice. Over this 



HO IV IV E PASSED THE WIXTER. 205 

circular pen of ice — which you can 
imitate on a small scale with a circu- 
lar row of upright dominoes on their 
ends and joined edge to edge — the sum- 
mer seal-skin tent is lashed across poles 
for a roof, and the ice-house is complete. 
By and by. this roof, sagging with snow, 
may be taken off and a dome of snow 
put on, which gives more height and 
consequently more comfort. 

In our first winter camp in North Hud- 
son's Bay, the houses were made of these 
ice-slabs in the manner just described, 
and surmounted by a dome of snow. 
They were supplied with little circular 
windows, also made of thin sheets of 
ice, which let in the light quite as well as 
our own at home, although not nearly so 
much light, because they are very much 
smaller than our windows. 



2o6 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

Before these houses g-et covered inside 
with the black soot from the burning 
lamps, and before the snow outside has 
drifted up level with the roof, a night 
scene in a village of ice, and especially if 
the village be a large one and all the 
lamps be burning brilliantly, is one of 
the prettiest views a stranger can find in 
that desolate land. If you could behold 
a village of cabins suddenly transformed 
into houses of glass, and filled with burn- 
ing lamps, it might represent an Eskimo 

ice-village at night. 

When our house was finished we 
took our summer tent, and, pitching it 
right against our house, used it as a 
storage-room. Here we put our pro- 
visions, our barrels of bread and mo- 
lasses; and one story I must tell you 
about the latter. When the bitter cold 



HOW JVE PASSED THE WIXTER. 207 

weather came on, and the molasses was 
frozen as hard as ice, the cook used to 
get ours in the same way that he would 
obtain so much ice : that is, he took a 
hatchet and chopped out lumps of it from 
the top of the barrel, and brought it in 
and put it over the lire, where it soon 
melted, so that we could use it. One 
day he left the hatchet on the frozen 
syrup, and when he needed it a few hours 
late., it Avas gone. Its disappearance 
was a great myster}, as the Eskimo 
never stole, and could not get into the 
tent in any case. The mystery, how- 
ever, was cleared up the next day, when 
an iron bar with which he had been 
splintering off some of the frozen mass 
was left in the barrel, and we found that 
it sank in the frozen syrup until only the 
end stuck out. And when we had cut it 



2o8 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

all out, we found the hatchet below, at 
the bottom. It seemed as absurd as to 
leave an ax on a frozen lake and to see 
it slowly sink through three or four feet 
of ice to the bottom. 

We built no other house for ourselves 
than this mixture of ice-walls and snow- 
roof, though all the Eskimo built regular 
igloos of snow as soon as that material 
was in good condition ; and when the 
bitter days of winter came on they always 
complained of cold when they came into 
our house. 

The reason why we did not build a 
warmer house of snow was that we had 
planned to leave our home in North Hud- 
son's Bay, and to pay a long visit to some 
whale-ships that were frozen in a harbor 
about a hundred miles farther south. 
There were four of these ships in a safe 



HOW WE PASSED THE WINTER, 209 

little harbor jutting into the shore of [Mar- 
ble Island, and I will tell you the way in 
which the whalers prepare themselves for 
their stay in these vessels during the long 
Arctic winter. In the fall of the year, 
just before it gets so cold that the ice 
forms, they huddle their ships together as 
closely as possible, and each ship puts 
down two anchors, one at the bow and one 
at the stern, and these hold them from 
striking against the shore or one another 
until the ice forms around them and freezes 
them in solidly. Then the anchors and 
rudders are taken up, and, with lumber 
which they have brought from home, the 
whalers build a rude but substantial house 
over the ship. After that has been com- 
pleted they get the Eskimo to build them a 
sort of snow-house or igloo over the wooden 
house again ; so, with all this covering to 



2 10 THE CHILDREN OP THE COLD. 

protect them, they manage to keep warm 
and comfortable with very Httle fire, 
however cold it may be out-of-doors. 
Sometimes they put in double windows, 
the inside ones of crlass, as usual, and the 
outside ones being made of slabs of ice, 
like the curious windows of the igloos. 
The white men do not live in the 
temporary houses built on top of the 
ships, but in the cabin and forecastle, 
just as if they were cruising out to sea. 
The house is simply put over the ship 
to keep the real places warm, and right 
well it does its work. This " house," 
however, is very useful as a place for 
taking exercise, for ship-carpentering 
work, and for any small jobs that may 
be necessary. The Eskimo also congre- 
gate there, especially about meal-time ; 
and the more generous whalers feed 



HOW WE PASSED THE WI.VIER. 211 

them \vith a little hard sea-bread and 
weak tea well sweetened with molasses, 
and for this the natives supply them with 
reindeer and Avalrus meat, and build the 
snow-houses over their ships. 

But you must not think that all ships 
in the Arctic winters fare so well as 
those I have just described. The 
whalers visit the polar regions nearly 
every winter, and know by experience 
how to be comfortable when there. 
Where they find whales they almost 
always find Eskimo, and the natives are 
of great assistance to them, as I have 
said. Many explorers, however, push 
beyond these limits, and we are con- 
stantlv readino" of their useless sufferinofs 
while in winter-quarters from not know- 
ing how to properly shield and maintain 
themselves. 



212 THE CHILDREN OF THE COLD. 

While in the fall the whalers patiently 
wait for the ice to form, so as to house 
themselves in, they do not in the spring 
wait for the ice to melt before getting to 
work catching whales that are sporting 
on the outside of the still frozen har- 
bors ; so they cut a channel, wide enough 
for the ship, through the ice from the 
open water to alongside the vessel, and 
she is then floated out. In the harbor at 
Marble Island, the work of cutting a 
channel only half a mile long occupied 
three weeks, each crew working six 
hour, night and day. But, as you proba- 
bly know already, the night is as light as 
the day, in the Arctic spring. 



